Volume 55, Number 15 · October 9, 2008
Martyred by Monsters
By Daniel J. Kevles
The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov: The Story of Stalin’s Persecution of One of the Great Scientists of the Twentieth Century
by Peter Pringle
Simon and Schuster, 370 pp., $26.00
Nikolai Vavilov's life would make a chilling film about how visionary science and intrepid intellectual adventure in Soviet Russia blackened into a vicious persecution and a martyr's death. Educated in the years following the rediscovery, in 1900, of Gregor Mendel's laws of heredity in peas, Vavilov was by the 1920s the principal champion of Mendel's genetics in the USSR. He was a prodigious collector of plants and seeds from foreign regions, and a powerful leader in the vast complex of Soviet agricultural research. Highly respected abroad, he was elected to full membership in the Soviet Academy of Sciences at the unprecedentedly young age of forty-two, and was awarded the Lenin Prize, one of the Soviet Union's highest honors, for his scientific accomplishments.
Review, 3938 words
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