https://nautil.us/the-botanist-who-defied-stalin-238183/
The Botanist Who Defied Stalin
- His dream of feeding the world died in prison. His dream of a seed bank lives on.
By Lee Alan Dugatkin April 21, 2021
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Vavilov, and those who starved at the VIR, could only have dreamed of the technology required to build and maintain a seed vault inside a mountain that sits in the permafrost of Spitsbergen, a remote Norwegian island 1,300 kilometers north of the Arctic circle. But the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is the futuristic version of what Vavilov had begun in 1921. Dubbed the Doomsday Vault, with a proclaimed mission to serve as “a global seed vault to serve as a backup storage facility … to store duplicates (backups) of seed samples from the world’s crop collections,” it opened in 2008, as a repository that would ultimately contain all the world’s crop plant genetic diversity. That vault is capable of storing 4.5 million different varieties of plants within its temperature controlled, -18 degrees Celsius facilities: With an average of 500 seeds per sample, that’s 2.5 billion seeds. Precisely the sort of place that Vavilov had dreamed of.
As of today, 1,074,537 samples from around the globe sit in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Among those samples are 60 boxes from depositor 1739365, the N.I. Vavilov All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Plant Industry. In those boxes lay samples from 148 species and 41 genera of domesticated plants collected from 109 countries. Many are the descendants of the seeds Vavilov himself collected.
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Reading this article, one can only wonder what could have been if he was in a “capitalist” country like at the time England or the USA was. Hard to imagine what he went thru to collect samples. Humanity may not know his name, but his genetic “children” live on forever.
So sad to read all these dedicated people dying of basically starvation and political persecution.
Next time someone extolls Communism or Socialism, they should be directed to read this.
“Capitalism” may be “bad” and have “flaws”, but Communism, and Socialism aka Communism “lite”, are horrendously worse.
“The greatest fallacy of democracy is that everyone’s opinion is worth the same.” — Robert A. Heinlein
“Capitalism is a moral system because it offers individual freedom. You choose what you want. You choose your money and where you want it to go. You can be yourself. Socialism is groupthink. Step outside the group straightjacket and freedom ends.” —Stuart Varney
“The answer certainly isn’t socialism. Middle-class voters currently presume that elites already control the government—so why would they want to give the bureaucracy any more power?” — RAHM EMANUEL was the 44th mayor of Chicago
“We all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor.” — Martin Luther King Jr
This man was an outstanding example of courage and determinatiom. We should all be like him even in the smallest ways possible.
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Reinke Faces Life 