Nikolai Vavilov

The Russian and Soviet agronomist, botanist and geneticist who mapped where the world's crops were born and gathered their diversity against the day it would be needed. His centers-of-origin theory, first published in 1924, and his Leningrad collection, the world's largest seed bank at over 148,000 specimens by 1933, founded crop conservation; during the Siege of Leningrad his staff guarded a quarter million samples while starving. Vavilov himself, denounced under Lysenko's ascendancy, died in a Saratov prison in 1943, the man who banked the seeds dying of hunger. His name is on the centers, the institute and the moral ledger of this science. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/