This book made me quite upset. Nikolai Vavilov was a man whose name deserved greater recognition. As a botanist and geneticist in the early 20th century, he characterised the origins of domestic crops, put forward the law of homologous variation (for laypeople, this is where you expect to see similar mutations in related species), and stared the earliest seed banks. And he came to a tragic end when he ran afoul of Stalin and one of his pet cranks. Under Lenin, Vavilov had managed to […]