Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, whose brief biography is being studied by the school curriculum, is a famous geneticist, Russian plant grower, geographer, founder of the doctrine of the origin of cultivated plants and the biological basis of selection, the initiator of the creation of many research institutions, was born in Moscow on November 25, 1887.
The Russian scientist made an invaluable contribution to science, which was recognized by biologists around the world.
Passion for plants from childhood
Nikolayās father, Ivan Ilyich, came from a peasant family, was a merchant of the second guild and was engaged in social activities. Before the revolution, he headed the manufactory factory āUdalov and Vavilovā. Mom - Alexandra Mikhailovna - was the daughter of a cutting artist Prokhovskaya manufactory. In total, there were seven children in the family, three of them died in childhood. The younger brother of the future scientist - Sergey Vavilov - devoted his life to physics, founded the scientific school of physical optics in the USSR, in 1945-1951 he led the USSR Academy of Sciences. Alexander's elder sister chose the medical path, becoming the organizer of sanitary-hygienic networks in Moscow. Lydia, a younger sister, learned to be a microbiologist, during one of the expeditions she contracted smallpox and died.
Nikolai Vavilov, whose short biography is interesting to admirers of his scientific activity, unlike other children, from childhood he was fond of the flora and fauna and had a high predisposition to natural sciences. This hobby was promoted by rare books, herbariums and geographical maps, which were in the large fatherās library and contributed to the formation of the personality of the future geneticist.
Vavilov Nikolai Ivanovich: a brief biography for children
By the will of his father, Nikolai Vavilov entered a commercial school. Upon graduation, in 1906, he became a student at the Agricultural Institute (Faculty of Agronomy) in Moscow. 1908 was marked by a student expedition to the Transcaucasia and the North Caucasus, where N. I. Vavilov, whose brief biography is compulsorily studied by the school curriculum, carried out geographical and botanical studies. In 1910, agronomic practice took place at the Poltava Experimental Station, charging Vavilov for further fruitful work.
During his studies at the institute, his propensity for research was manifested repeatedly in Nikolai; the student made reports on genealogy in the plant world and experimental morphology, presented a thesis on bare slugs that are harmful to agricultural land in the Moscow province. For this work, Nikolai Vavilov was awarded the prize of the Moscow Polytechnic Museum. At the end of his studies, a promising young man was left to prepare for the title of professor at the Department of Agriculture and assigned to the breeding station of this educational institution, where he began to study the immunity of cultivated plants to parasitic fungi. In parallel with this, Nikolai Ivanovich taught at the institute and at the women's courses in agriculture.
Acquaintance with the experience of European colleagues
From 1911 to 1912, he completed his internship in St. Petersburg, the purpose of which was to have a more in-depth familiarization with the geography of cultivated cereals, study their characteristics and diseases, and in 1913 a trip abroad to complete education. In Germany, Nikolai Ivanovich worked for some time in the laboratory of the German philosopher and naturalist Ernst Haeckel, in France he got acquainted with the new achievements of seed breeding, in England, under the guidance of Professor William Bateson (one of the outstanding geneticists of the time), whom Vavilov considered his teacher, he studied stability to cereal diseases . The First World War caused the trip to be interrupted, and Nikolai Ivanovich was forced to return to Moscow, where he continued his work on the study of plant immunity, conducting experiments in the capitalās nurseries paired with Professor S. Zhegalov.
Why did Russian soldiers die in Persia?
In 1916, Nikolai Vavilov received a master's degree, having successfully passed the exams; during the same period, he was exempted from military service due to a visual impairment (he damaged his eyes in childhood) and a Russian army was attracted as a consultant on mass diseases in Persia. The cause of the disease was able to identify Vavilov Nikolai Ivanovich. A short biography for children of grade 2 describes that pieces of the seeds of the Chaff were intoxicating with the fungus Stromantinia temulenta, which produces a substance that can cause poisoning in humans - the subjectine alkaloid. The result of his action was loss of consciousness, cramps, drowsiness, and dizziness; there was a chance of death. The problem was solved by banning the use of local products; provisions were supplied from Russia.
Having received permission from the military leadership to conduct the expedition, Vavilov went deep into Iran, setting the goal to study samples of local cereals. Having sown seeds of Persian wheat in England, Nikolai Ivanovich tried in various ways to infect it with powdery mildew, using even nitrogen fertilizer, which caused the development of the disease. All attempts were unsuccessful, on the basis of which scientists concluded that plant immunity is directly dependent on environmental conditions of the initial formation of this species. It was during this expedition that Nikolai Ivanovich came up with the assumption of the laws of hereditary variability.
Career progress
The year 1917 was marked for Vavilov by the election of assistants to the Department of Applied Botany on the recommendation of Regel R.E. None of the scientists who worked on plant immunity could approach the topic so closely, while comprehensively covering the question of how Nikolay Ivanovich Vavilov did it. A short biography for children tells that in 1917 the scientist moved to Saratov, where he headed the department of selection, genetics and private agriculture at the Higher Agricultural Courses. As a professor at the Faculty of Agronomy from 1917 to 1921 at the University of Saratov, Vavilov, along with lecturing, began an experimental study of the immunity of crops. The result of this huge work, including the study of several hundred varieties of wheat and oats, the analysis of the immunity of varieties and their susceptibility to diseases, the identification of anatomical abilities, was published in 1919, the monograph "Plant immunity to infectious diseases."
In 1920, a well-known scientist made a report on the law of hereditary variability of homological series at the Third All-Russian Congress, the organizing committee of which he headed. The report was the largest event in the world of biological science and was positively received by the scientific community.
Experience, research, achievements
In 1920, after being elected to the post of head of the Department of Applied Botany and Breeding, Nikolai Vavilov, whose brief biography is described in many school textbooks, moved to Petrograd, where he began to conduct scientific work on a grand scale. The head of this organization, later renamed the All-Union Institute of Plant Production, Vavilov remained until the end of 1940. Together with A. A. Yachevsky, Nikolai Ivanovich was sent to the United States, where he agreed on the supply of seeds, while at the same time examining the grain areas of the American territories. On the way back, the scientist visited Belgium, Holland, France, Sweden, England, where he held a series of meetings with scientists, got acquainted with breeding stations and scientific laboratories, established new connections and organized the procurement of scientific equipment, literature and varietal seed material.
The year 1923 was marked for Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov by the election of the director of the State Institute of Experimental Agronomy. At the initiative of the scientist in the 1920s, a large number of scientific stations were created in various climatic and soil conditions of the USSR that studied and tested various forms of useful plants.
Invaluable contribution to science
The biography of Vavilov Nikolai Ivanovich is closely connected with scientific expeditions carried out from 1924 to 1929. These are Afghanistan, Africa, the Mediterranean, Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, during which scientists replenished the collection of seed material (in the number of thousands of samples) and studied the foci of cultivated plants.
In 1927, for the brilliant report āGeographical experiments on the study of variability of cultivated plants in the USSRā, which Nikolai Ivanovich made in Rome at a conference of agricultural experts, the scientist was awarded the Gold Medal, and the conference decided to apply the system of geographical crops developed by Vavilov on a global scale.
Family of Nikolai Vavilov
Vavilov Nikolai Ivanovich, whose brief biography talks about his tremendous achievements in the world of science, was married twice. The first wife of the scientist was Ekaterina Nikolaevna Sakharova, from the marriage with whom her son Oleg was born. He died at the age of 28 in the Caucasus during climbing. The second wife is a doctor of agricultural sciences, biologist Elena Barulina, whom Nikolai Ivanovich has known since her student days (1918); the young girl took part in many of her mentor's endeavors (including an expedition to the southeastern part of Russia), wrote articles that were included in Vavilovās books on field crops. Family Elena Ivanovna and Nikolai Ivanovich created in 1926. From this marriage Yuri Vavilov came into being, who became a doctor of physical and mathematical sciences, a nuclear physicist and did a lot to search for information about his father and publish them.
On the account of Vavilov, the creation of institutes of fruit growing, vegetable and potato farming, subtropical crops, viticulture, feed, aromatic and medicinal plants - more than a hundred scientific institutions. In 1930, Nikolai Vavilov headed the genetic laboratory of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Leningrad, in 1931 - the All-Union Geographical Society.
Arrest and False Accusation
A successful career, the world recognition of Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov did not give rest to his envious persons, who wrote a letter with political accusations to Stalin, in which they accused Vavilov of isolation from the actual needs of agriculture, political indiscrimination, in which Vavilov did not distinguish between the true enemies of Soviet power. In parallel, public harassment was carried out in periodicals. Since 1934, Nikolai Ivanovich was prohibited from traveling abroad, his work was found to be unsatisfactory.
Vavilov was arrested in August 1940, charged with counter-revolutionary activity. In 1941, the scientist was sentenced to death; the sentence was replaced in 1942 with a 20-year sentence. Nikolai Ivanovich died in a hospital in the Saratov prison, having suffered from pneumonia and dysentery during his imprisonment; in the last year of his life he suffered from dystrophy. Death came from a decline in cardiac activity. The Russian scientist was posthumously rehabilitated in 1955: all charges against him turned out to be trumped up, not true. Vavilov Nikolay Ivanovich was buried, a brief biography of which is interesting to a large number of his admirers, in a common grave, with the rest of the prisoners.