Science is a wonderfully self-checking system. If science has data and explanations, it does not matter what governments think, or religions, or even a majority of people. Science isn't out to please partisans or appease dictators; when governments have insisted that science support particular explanations, the result has not been good for science or for government. The supreme example of this was Josef Stalin's support, on political principle, of the self-taught botanical quack named Trofim Lysenko. The disgrace of the Lysenko affair is well known; less well known is Lysenko's scientific rival, Nikolai Vavilov, whom Stalin and Lysenko arranged to be arrested and purged, and whose ideas were scrubbed from Soviet science until rationality resumed. Just what science and the Soviet Union and the world lost is told in the fascinating _The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov: The Story of Stalin's Persecution of One of the Great Scientists of the Twentieth Century_ (Simon & Schuster) by Peter Pringle, a British journalist and longtime Russia watcher. The story is a human one, however, and deeply tragic; Pringle has produced a clear and sympathetic biography of Vavilov, while also summarizing some complicated history and science.

Stalin didn't like genetics, preferring older ideas of inheritance which would support how one generation could suffer but bring forth a stronger generation, bourgeois could produce Bolshevik. Nikolai Vavilov was born in Moscow in 1887, and went on to study in Cambridge where he got a strong education in the newly-rediscovered ideas of Mendel. From 1916 to 1933 he made expeditions to five continents, hunting up lost specimens and seeds. There was danger, natural and man-made, in such exploits, but he was an inspiring figure, a sort of Indiana Jones, delighting in the work and full of infectious enthusiasm. He had Lenin's support, but Lenin died in 1924. Stalin preferred the "barefoot scientist" Lysenko, who was an uneducated peasant with the knack for self-salesmanship, and promises that he could "educate" wheat to make an Eden of Russia's wastelands. Stalin was impressed, and eventually Lysenko was in charge of Vavilov and all of Vavilov's research facilities. Lysenko denounced Vavilov as a purveyor of Mendelism, and under the cover of the start of WWII, Stalin's secret police made their arrest; Vavilov had international contacts and there would have been an uproar during peacetime. He died three years after his arrest, of malnutrition; he had tried to harness real science against famine, and starvation got him in the end. It was a tragic end, a terrible waste of an extraordinary mind.

After Stalin's death in 1953, Lysenko managed to gain power under Khrushchev, but after Khrushchev was ousted, Lysenko's skills in self-promotion failed, as science simply passed him by. His damage, however, to the academic discipline of genetics was to wound science in the Soviet Union for decades, and since his own theories were nonsense, they contributed nothing to the improvement of Soviet agriculture. The persecution of Vavilov and his theories might be said to have contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union, because the Communists wound up importing grain and other farm products even from the capitalists in the U.S. Vavilov got posthumous recognition, and is highly esteemed in his homeland, with his seed bank being a priceless resource that is even more valuable than in his day because of loss of plant diversity. Pringle tells this great, sad story with clarity and passion. He never explicitly makes the connection to our own times or society, but even now funding for education and research on topics of sexuality, global warming, or evolution are tied to what is politically correct. Science doesn't have all the answers, but it has answers, and we let political or religious whims overrun them at our peril.

Nikolai Vavilov was born in 1887, son of a prominent Moscow merchant. He was educated as a plant breeder, using the recently re-discovered work of Gregory Mendel about how inherited traits were passed from generation to generation - elevating plant breeding to the status of a science. By combining plants with desirable qualities, plant breeders could create superior seeds - seeds that were more resistant to disease, produced higher yields, consumed less water, and required shorter growing seasons.

In order to do his work, Vavilov believed he needed easy access to a wide variety of seeds. He devoted his life to creating a seed bank, personally going on expeditions all over the world. In the process, he earned the reputation of being a tireless worker, brilliant organizer, and superb scientist. At a young age, he became the head of a major agency in Moscow, dedicated to improving and overhauling Russian agriculture. Then along came Stalin.

Like many other accomplished citizens from Russia, Vavilov became a victim of one of Stalin's purges. He came from a wealthy family, was not a communist, and was friendly with some of Stalin's enemies. He was arrested in 1940, charged with serious crimes that were fabricated; then was tortured, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death by firing squad. Later, his sentence was commuted to 20 years in prison, but his jailors starved him to death in 1943. This book flows like a novel and documents his story and that of his nemesis, Lysenko, who captured Stalin's fancy but ruined Russian agriculture for a whole generation.

Vavilov spent his whole life experimenting with seeds. His innovations brought about huge strides in knowledge that could, at least theoretically, eliminate world hunger. In reading this account, I was struck with the serendipity factor that causes one scientist to be remembered over another. The young Charles Darwin was captivated by the way species changed over time. Newton dealt with gravity, planetary motion, physics, and calculus. Einstein's theories refined and modified Newton's work. Maxwell discovered electromagnetic fields and documented them mathematically. Madame Curie made significant discoveries about radiation. Bohr and Schrodinger developed quantum theory. Each of these scientists has attracted biographers. The story in this book suggests they probably didn't work any harder or more intelligently than Vavilov, yet they are all much better known. What they (perhaps accidentally) spent their lives studying, for whatever reason, was deemed more worthy of renown than the science of improving agriculture through genetics. Also to his credit, Vavilov appears to have had more positive attributes and fewer of the negatives than most, if not all, of the above. This is a guy you would like to be around.

Anyway, "The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov" is a fascinating read about a remarkable man who stood out as one of the best scientists of his generation - highly recommended.

Nikolai Vavilov was born in 1887, son of a prominent Moscow merchant. He was educated as a plant breeder, using the recently re-discovered work of Gregory Mendel about how inherited traits were passed from generation to generation - elevating plant breeding to the status of a science. By combining plants with desirable qualities, plant breeders could create superior seeds - seeds that were more resistant to disease, produced higher yields, consumed less water, and required shorter growing seasons. In order to do his work, Vavilov believed he needed easy access to a wide variety of seeds. He devoted his life to creating a seed bank, personally going on expeditions all over the world. In the process, he earned the reputation of being a tireless worker, brilliant organizer, and superb scientist. At a young age, he became the head of a major agency in Moscow, dedicated to improving and overhauling Russian agriculture. Then along came Stalin.

Like many other accomplished citizens from Russia, Vavilov became a victim of one of Stalin's purges. He came from a wealthy family, was not a communist, and was friendly with some of Stalin's enemies. He was arrested in 1940, charged with serious crimes that were fabricated; then was tortured, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death by firing squad. Later, his sentence was commuted to 20 years in prison, but his jailors starved him to death in 1943. This book flows like a novel and documents his story and that of his nemesis, Lysenko, who captured Stalin's fancy but ruined Russian agriculture for a whole generation.

Vavilov spent his whole life experimenting with seeds. His innovations brought about huge strides in knowledge that could, at least theoretically, eliminate world hunger. In reading this account, I was struck with the serendipity factor that causes one scientist to be remembered over another. The young Charles Darwin was captivated by the way species changed over time. Newton dealt with gravity, planetary motion, physics, and calculus. Einstein's theories refined and modified Newton's work. Maxwell discovered electromagnetic fields and documented them mathematically. Madame Curie made significant discoveries about radiation. Bohr and Schrodinger developed quantum theory. Each of these scientists has attracted biographers. The story in this book suggests they probably didn't work any harder or less intelligently than Vavilov, yet they are all much better known. What they (perhaps accidentally) spent their lives studying, for whatever reason, was deemed more worthy of renown than the science of improving agriculture through genetics. In addition, Vavilov appears to have had more positive attributes and fewer of the negative than most, if not all, of the above. This is a guy you would like to be around.

Anyway, "The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov" is a fascinating read about a remarkable man who stood out as one of the best scientists of his generation - highly recommended.

This book is written as if it is just a murder story and it can be read almost as a summer beach book for it's entertainment value. But, it is really one of the most important and clearest history lessons of the 20th Century. Briefly, it tells the story of a man who literally devoted his entire life to the goal of trying to save the millions of his fellow citizens who were starving as a result of the Stalin's collectivization of farms and the enormous crop failures that followed. A man who was personally picked by Stalin because of his devotion to Russia and his fellowman to save the Russian economy and to lead Russia to scientific glory by developing new crops. Unfortunately for Nikolai, he was educated as a scientist, and he understood the nature of Mendelian Inheritance and thus the importance of collecting variant plants and cross-breeding them as was being done in Europe and the USA to create higher yield crops. Nikolai, in spite of his support from Stalin; having a massive number of institute scientists devoted to the task; and his personal devotion to the scientific work could promise only to accomplish his goals in 7-14 years. This allowed T.D. Lysenko, an anti-intellectual, self-promoting snake oil salesman, who promised he could produce far superior crops in just one year to gain Stalin's support. Here comes the history lesson. At T.D. Lysenko's urging scientists who `believed in' Mendelian genetics were declared political enemies by Stalin and sent to the gulag prisons in mass. The `teaching' of Mendelian Genetics as well as the practice of cross breeding to produce new stains of crops was outlawed. Yes, even textbooks and journals from the West were censored or banned outright. The politicians had decided that the science of genetics was heretical. (Can anyone spot the connection to that time in history and the current attempts to politically force evolution out of the classroom or failing that to force the teaching of creationism in or at least to force the newest 'anti-intellectual idea' called intelligent design upon students in the USA?) Well, it doesn't take much knowledge of the Russia of this 21st Century to realize that they have still not recovered from the politically motivated control of science that ended well over 50 years ago. Thirty years of bad education destroyed so many generations of potential scientists that the Russian academics still have not caught up to the West in crop production. They were essentially totally left out of the "Century of Genetics" that ended with the human genome project. This is clearly much more than just a murder story. Yes, Nikolai was sent to prison where he was tortured and starved to death within blocks of his wife and family who had no idea where he was. The reason that I give the book only a B plus is because the really good murder story is told very well but the extremely valuable history lesson was only a subplot. I would suggest that one read "The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko" as a companion book to this one for the full picture.The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov: The Story of Stalin's Persecution of One of the Great Scientists of the Twentieth Century

Until Peter Pringle's brilliant new book, only a few specialists in the west knew anything about Nikolai Vavilov. Yet every visit to every grocery store, to every farm market, to every harvested plant and animal in the world owed a huge debt to a person who, ironically enough, was starved to death by Stalin in 1943. Pringle uses his own vast experience as a correspondent in Russia to gain access to many of the people who knew about, or worked with Vavilov. He also was given access to a vast collection of personal correspondence and photographs that flesh out the characters involved. The work is written in rich, detailed and at times emotional prose. This book will be enjoyed by anyone who wonders how politics can influence science, scientists, science policy and the rest of us as the consumers of science. The book is about the past but - unfortunately - the content is very relevant to today.