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Nikolai Vavilov’s story has stuck with Longjiang Fan ever since he learned about the Soviet plant biologist during his undergraduate studies in China in the 1980s. Vavilov’s scientific ideas were both important and novel, explains Fan, now a crop scientist at Zhejiang University. Vavilov refused to renounce those ideas even when he faced a death sentence in the 1940s because his research on genetics and inheritance ran counter to the Lamarckian ideas favored under Joseph Stalin. He died of starvation in prison in 1943.
One of Vavilov’s enduring contributions to science is a concept known as Vavilovian mimicry. Based on his observations of domesticated oats and rye, as well as of their wild relatives, Vavilov proposed that the crops’ ancestors were weeds that, over generations, came to resemble domesticated wheat because wheat-like characteristics helped them avoid being weeded out by farmers. It was only after this ...
