Vavilov had so inspired his fellow scientists that they moved hundreds of boxes of seeds to a basement and took shifts inside the dark building, in the sub-zero temperatures, to protect the collection. What happened next is well known to botanists, but it’s a story we should all know. Surrounded by seeds they could have eaten, the caretakers of the collection faced hunger rather than jeopardise the genetic resource. By the end of the 900-day siege, in the spring of 1944, nine of them had died of starvation, including the curator of the rice collection.
