Nikolai Vavilov

Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov ForMemRS, HFRSE (Russian: Никола́й Ива́нович Вави́лов, IPA: [nʲɪkɐˈlaj ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ vɐˈvʲiləf] ^ⓘ; 25 November [O.S. 13 November] 1887 – 26 January 1943) was a Russian and Soviet agronomist, botanist and geneticist who identified the centers of origin of cultivated plants. His research focused on improvement of wheat, maize and other cereal crops.

Vavilov became the youngest member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. He was a member of the USSR Central Executive Committee, a recipient of the Lenin Prize, and president of All-Union Geographical Society. He was a fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Vavilov's work was criticized by Trofim Lysenko, whose anti-Mendelian concepts of plant biology had won favor with Joseph Stalin. As a result, Vavilov was arrested and subsequently sentenced to death in July 1941. Although his sentence was commuted to twenty years' imprisonment, he died in prison in 1943. In 1955, his death sentence was retroactively pardoned under Nikita Khrushchev. By the late 1950s, his reputation was publicly rehabilitated, and he began to be hailed as a hero of Soviet science.