His most celebrated achievement was establishing the world’s largest seed bank in Leningrad, as Saint Petersburg was called from shortly after Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924 until the end of the Soviet era. The vast collection, part of the All-Union Institute of Plant Industry Vavilov directed from 1921 to 1940, offered the possibility of food security through biodiversity—species and strains that might be disease or pest resistant, grow in various conditions, increase yield or nutrition, and the like (and it is celebrated in part because its devoted caretakers starved to death rather than
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