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00:00To be human.
00:30Has been to know the torment of hunger.
00:36There was once a man who dreamed that through science, we could make a world where no one
00:41would ever perish from hunger, and famine would be no more.
00:46He gave us a treasure to fulfill that promise, but he faced a terrible choice at a moment
00:51of reckoning.
00:52To lie about science and live, or to tell the truth and face certain death.
01:00. . .
01:03. . .
01:07. . .
01:09. . .
01:15¶¶
01:45¶¶
02:10For the first couple of hundred thousand years that we were human,
02:14we were wanderers living beneath the stars.
02:17We gathered plant life and hunted animals
02:20until about ten or twelve thousand years ago
02:23when our ancestors invented a new way to live.
02:27Think of those geniuses who were the first to realize
02:31that inside the plants they foraged
02:33was a means to make another plant, a seed.
02:38That discovery led to the single most fateful choice our species ever made.
02:51They could continue to wander in small bands,
02:55or they could settle down to grow and raise their food.
02:59This required sacrifices for rewards that would not come until much later.
03:04For the first time, we were thinking about the future.
03:08Of course, these decisions weren't made in an instant.
03:14They unfolded over generations.
03:17That seems like a long time ago in human terms,
03:20but in the great sweep of cosmic time,
03:23it was less than a half a minute ago.
03:25This cosmic calendar compresses all of the last 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang
03:34into a single calendar Earth year.
03:36Midnight on December 31st is right now.
03:40Every month is a little more than a billion years.
03:44Every day, a little less than 40 million years.
03:48And all of humanity's proudest achievements unfold in the last couple of minutes of cosmic time.
03:56That's how new we are to the universe.
04:01Our ancestors began to domesticate animals and plants less than 30 seconds ago on the cosmic calendar.
04:08For the first time, the wanderers were settling down
04:12and building things to last for more than a single season.
04:16They dared to touch the future.
04:20Their Tower of Jericho still stands.
04:23Was it a watchtower for protecting the city from invaders?
04:27Or just a way to get closer to the stars?
04:30It took 11,000 workdays to build.
04:35Something that could only be possible with the food surpluses that agriculture provided.
04:40This is the world's oldest stairway.
04:45It was already 5,000 years old before the first Egyptian pyramid was built.
04:51To climb it is to follow in the footsteps of 300 generations.
04:57Isn't it astonishing that people who had barely ceased wandering were able to create something of such permanence?
05:06The rich and varied hunter-gatherer diet of plants, insects, birds and other animals was replaced.
05:20City dwellers largely subsisted on a few carbohydrate crops.
05:25And when the rains didn't come, or fungus afflicted the grain, there was hunger on a massive scale.
05:32Famine.
05:35Famines caused by drought and British colonial mismanagement in India in the 18th century killed 10 million people.
05:46In China, during the famines of the 19th century, more than 100 million people perished.
05:53The great hunger in Ireland, also a result of British imperial policy, starved a million to death and forced another 2 million to flee the country in search of a living.
06:05The Brazilian drought and pestilence of 1877 was comparable.
06:10In a single province, more than half died of starvation.
06:14The dead remain uncounted from the famines that racked Ethiopia, Rwanda, and the Sahel in Africa.
06:23For a couple of thousand years, ever since records were kept, somewhere on Earth, people in great numbers have starved.
06:37Could agriculture become a science with a predictive theory as reliable as gravity?
06:43One that could consistently produce breeds, able to stand up to drought and disease.
06:49Farmers and herders knew the advantages of preferentially selecting the hardiest specimens for crossbreeding to produce a more successful hybrid.
06:58This was known as artificial selection.
07:01But the mechanism of how those traits were passed on to succeeding generations remained a complete mystery.
07:08This is Down House, Charles Darwin's home, where he lived with his wife Emma and their 10 children.
07:16He was hardly the authoritarian Victorian patriarch, but instead a tender loving father who delighted in his children's ridicule.
07:25This is the garden he planted.
07:30This place is a strangely pastoral setting for the most influential revolutionary in the history of thought.
07:38Even now, there are people who are afraid of his idea.
07:44Charles Darwin discovered that species, including ours, evolve over time through a process of natural selection.
07:56The environment rewards those best adapted to its changing realities with survival and with new generations of offspring.
08:03Darwin demystified the external reality of life, but no one had any idea what the inner mechanisms of evolution were.
08:15At that same moment, an abbot at a rural monastery in what is now the Czech Republic was trying to become a science professor.
08:22Gregor Mendel flunked his qualifying exam both times.
08:28The only career path open to him was to become a substitute teacher.
08:32So in his spare time, he took up the study of pea plants.
08:37He bred tens of thousands of them, carefully scrutinizing their height and their shape and the color of their pods, their seeds and flowers.
08:47Mendel was searching for a predictive theory of breeding so that you could know in advance exactly what you would get when you crossed a tall plant with a short one and a green pea with a yellow one.
09:04Mendel found that you would get a yellow pea every time.
09:10We didn't have a word for the power of the yellow over the green until Mendel coined it.
09:15He called that quality dominant.
09:18And to his delight, he found that he could predict what would happen in the next generation of peas after that.
09:26One in four pea plants would be green.
09:30Mendel named the hidden trait that popped up in the next crop recessive.
09:36There was something he called factors hidden inside the plants that caused particular characteristics.
09:43And they operated by a law that Mendel could describe with a simple equation like gravity.
09:51Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel didn't know it.
09:54But the two scientists were deciphering the mysterious workings of life at the very same moment.
10:04Darwin presented the evidence for our oneness with all life.
10:09That despite our pretensions to a mystical higher birth, we were actually relatives to the other beasts and vegetables.
10:17As much a part of the natural world as any other living thing.
10:24Mendel discovered that there were laws governing the way life's messages were passed on.
10:29The substitute teacher had invented a whole new field of science.
10:34But nobody noticed for 35 years.
10:39He died never knowing that the world would come to see him as a giant in the history of science.
10:45Mendel's work was resurrected at the beginning of the 20th century.
10:50And he had no more vigorous defender than the British zoologist William Bateson.
10:56It was Bateson who named the new field of science devoted to studying these factors.
11:02Genetics.
11:05Bateson and his colleagues worked on developing new breeds of plants and animals.
11:10He believed that science and freedom were indivisible.
11:14And that's how he ran his laboratory.
11:18Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, a visiting botanist from Russia, took Bateson's credo deeply to heart.
11:26He wanted to use the new field of genetics to learn how to feed the world.
11:32He was on his honeymoon, but science was his passion.
11:36Even as a child, Vavilov had a sense of urgency.
11:40Too little time, too much to do was his lifelong refrain.
11:48How could he have known what was coming?
11:58The idea that our planet is a single organism, a unity, has a ring of hollow sentimentality for many people.
12:14But it's just a scientific fact.
12:16Something is about to happen here in remote southern Peru in the year 1600 on February 19th at 5 p.m.
12:30Unsuspecting multitudes in distant foreign capitals will never know how this event reached around the world to torment and kill them.
12:42This nasty mixture of sulfuric acid and volcanic ash will block the sun's rays from reaching Earth.
12:58Some of the sunlight will be absorbed here in the stratosphere.
13:02The eruption of Huayna Putina Volcano remains to this day the largest explosion in South America in recorded history.
13:10Winter is coming.
13:16Volcanic winter.
13:22For the people of Russia, it brought the worst winter in six centuries.
13:28For two years, even the summer temperatures would fall below freezing at night.
13:34Two million people, a third of Russia's population, would die from the resulting famine.
13:40It led to the downfall of the Tsar, Boris Gudunov, and all because of a volcano that erupted 8,000 miles away in Peru.
13:49This was not the last famine in Russian history.
13:52Drought and famines occurred frequently.
13:55But it wasn't until nearly three centuries later, in 1891, that the magnitude of suffering was again as ghastly.
14:03Winter came early that year, and the crops failed.
14:08Tsar Alexander III was slow to respond.
14:11Wealthy Russian merchants continued to export grain at a profit, even as millions went hungry.
14:18All the Tsar had to offer his starving subjects was famine bread.
14:23A miserable mixture of moss, weeds, bark, and husks.
14:29Half a million Russians perished, while the aristocracy and the wealthy feasted on fresh strawberries from the south of France
14:37and clotted cream from England.
14:40The Russian Revolution would not explode for another 30 years.
14:44But many historians believe that this famine was the spark that ignited the long fuse.
14:51It was to make a lasting impression on the hero of our story, Nikolai Vavilov.
15:01This is the Vavilov family.
15:03The parents were born into poverty, but had worked their way up into the upper middle class.
15:08All four of the children would grow up to become scientists.
15:13Sergei became a physicist.
15:18Nikolai grew up to be a botanist.
15:23Don't come near me.
15:38If you touch me, I'll jump.
15:41Even as a boy, Vavilov was never one to back down.
15:46In 1911, Russia was the largest grain exporter on earth, despite the fact that its farming methods were antiquated.
15:53The Petrovsky Institute was the only place in Russia where scientists could hope to modernize food production through the new science of genetics.
16:02But it was still a matter of controversy.
16:05Debate topic for today.
16:07Is plant selection a science or not?
16:10It is not a science.
16:12The farmer knows best.
16:13He's been sowing the larger seeds and crossbreeding the fattest animals for thousands of years.
16:19What do we scientists have to offer them?
16:22Except fancy equations to confuse the peasants.
16:25They don't want that.
16:26They want bread.
16:28The farmer has wisdom and is worthy of our respect.
16:32But tragically, he lacks the predictive powers of science.
16:36He cannot foretell which traits will dominate or which will be recessive.
16:40The farmer plays roulette and he is about as successful as the average gambler.
16:51Gregor Mendel made it possible for him to know the odds.
16:54To know what number the ball will land.
16:57The moment Mendel expressed his ideas mathematically, agriculture became a science.
17:03And that only hope to efficiently feed ourselves and feed the world.
17:14In 1914, during the First World War, Vavilov began to wonder.
17:20Where did the domesticated plants come from?
17:23Who were their ancestors?
17:26In a love letter he wrote,
17:28I really believe deeply in science.
17:31It is my life and the purpose of my life.
17:35I do not hesitate to give my life even for the smallest bit of science.
17:45The First World War revealed the deep cracks in Russian society.
17:50And spurred the outbreak of revolution and civil war.
17:54Vavilov established the first of his 400 scientific institutes.
17:58Where the children of peasants and laborers became scientists.
18:02All in the service of Vavilov's dream of ending famine.
18:06In 1920, Vavilov dared to propose a new law of nature.
18:13Comrades, the same genes perform the same functions in different species of plants.
18:20This is because they share a common ancestor.
18:23In order to understand evolution and to guide our breeding work scientifically,
18:29we must go to the oldest agricultural countries where these common ancestors may still live.
18:36Russia shall not perish as long as there are people like Nikolai Vavilov.
18:41Vavilov was now world famous.
18:44Me, I'm nothing special.
18:46It's my brother Sergei, the physicist who's the brilliant one.
18:51Vavilov knew that every seedling contains its species' unique message.
18:56The contents differed, but they were all written in a mysterious language.
19:01One that would not be deciphered for decades.
19:04Vavilov wanted to preserve every phrase of life's ancient scripture.
19:09To ensure its safe passage to the future.
19:12He was among the first to grasp the critical importance of biodiversity.
19:17Vavilov came up with an entirely new concept.
19:20A world seed bank that he hoped would be impervious to war and natural catastrophe.
19:27And there was a scientific underpinning to this humanitarian goal.
19:31If you could find the earliest living specimens of the plants we eat,
19:35you could parse its sentences and decipher life's language.
19:39You could know how it changed over time.
19:42This decryption would make it possible to write new messages.
19:46To grow food immune to disease, fungus, and insects.
19:50And resistant to drought.
19:52Vavilov would become a hunter of plants on five continents.
19:56Venturing to places no scientist dared go before him.
20:00Without maps or roads, Vavilov was the first European in modern times
20:09to venture into the mountainous regions of Afghanistan.
20:12Riddled with tribal clashes and other dangers.
20:15Vavilov was suspicious of the prevalent hypothesis
20:19that humans invented agriculture in the river Deltas.
20:23He reasoned that remote mountain strongholds would be a much safer place to farm.
20:28Far from the casual plundering of passers-by.
20:32As Vavilov risked life and limb, searching for seeds on five continents,
20:37his legend as a daredevil equaled his reputation for scientific genius.
20:46In 1927, in what was then Abyssinia, now Ethiopia,
20:51Vavilov discovered the mother of all coffee.
20:54It was a good thing, too.
20:56Because he needed to stay awake all night, guarding the camp.
20:59It was a good thing, too.
21:00But there's some peace.
21:01Today, the authorities only thought about the rebel.
21:02We saw him like this, and the pushback.
21:03They thought about the people.
21:04It was a good thing, too.
21:05But then they would be like the bunch to do.
21:06It was a good thing about the people.
21:07It was a good thing.
21:08And, of course, they would be like the potrzeb of the land.
21:09The poor south, in fact, the camp.
21:10As Vavilov waited for permission to travel into the interior, he was surprised to receive
21:33an invitation from the regent and future emperor of Ethiopia, Rastafari, or, as the world
21:40would come to know him, Haile Selassie.
21:43Vavilov later recalled,
21:45It was just the two of us. He questioned me with great interest about my country and its revolution.
21:52I informed him that Lenin, our founder, had died and Joseph Stalin now ruled.
21:58I told Rastafari how Stalin's armed robbery of a bank had raised $3 million for the revolution
22:05and made him a folk hero in Russia 20 years before.
22:09As Vavilov continued his global quest for seed and knowledge, Trofim Lysenko, one of Vavilov's
22:16numerous protégés, was beginning to make a name for himself.
22:21Fresh green peas in the wintertime? Sound too good to be true?
22:26Not if barefoot plant expert Trofim Lysenko has anything to say about it.
22:31No universities are staring at the hairy legs of flies in laboratories for him.
22:36No lavish trips to foreign lands in pursuit of ancient asparagus.
22:41He does it the peasant way in the fields of Mother Russia.
22:44And there'll be green peas on the table this January, thanks to him.
22:49As Joseph Stalin was having all his political rivals systematically murdered,
22:54he began to slash away at the structure of Russian agriculture.
22:58His stated goal was to modernize Soviet agriculture.
23:02But the result was catastrophic.
23:05Stalin ordered the kulaks, as the more prosperous peasants were known,
23:10to be liquidated as a class.
23:12Between 5 and 10 million people perished of famine.
23:16But to Trofim Lysenko, this massive tragedy was an opportunity.
23:22Lysenko hated Vavilov for his knowledge and fame.
23:26And like the snake that he was, he knew exactly when to strike.
23:31And ultimately, his venom would be fatal.
23:34The Garden of Eden must have been somewhere near here, in Central Asia.
23:47Because this is where the first apples grew.
23:50Vavilov traveled the world, identifying the first places on Earth to bear these seeds.
23:56Collecting samples of each for safekeeping.
23:59All in all, Vavilov brought back a quarter of a million varieties of seeds.
24:05The Russia Vavilov returned to was a different country.
24:15One in the grip of the most vicious famine it had ever known.
24:19The heady optimism of the revolution had been replaced with dread and despair.
24:25Vavilov's Institute of Plant Industry, in the city that was then called Leningrad,
24:30was now the largest collection of genetic information on Earth.
24:36His team began to sort and catalog every precious seed.
24:40They worked tirelessly, as if the life of every hungry Russian depended on them.
24:46The Comrade Stalin, I have something of vital importance to our nation's security to tell you.
25:05I know why the country starves, and I know how to turn famine into plenty.
25:09So that you may triumph over all those who seek to undermine you.
25:13Well then, Comrade Lysenko, you must be a very powerful man.
25:17The scientists are lying to you.
25:20Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, Nikolai Vavilov.
25:23All liars.
25:25Comrade, why do you think the giraffe has a long neck?
25:30A giraffe? Why are you wasting my time?
25:33So it can nibble on leaves at the top of the trees?
25:37Exactly. But the scientists say no.
25:41They believe in imaginary invisible entities called the genes,
25:45that somehow get changed by equally invisible forces that tell the giraffe to have a long neck,
25:50and the chicken to have a short one.
25:53I don't believe in imaginary things, but Vavilov does.
25:57And that's why our people starve.
25:59While he's been off collecting souvenirs, I've been devising a way to give Mother Russia the thing she needs most.
26:07A harvest of wheat in the dead of winter.
26:10If this is true, if you really have this power...
26:15I do, Comrade. I do.
26:17But I must have a free hand.
26:19No more interference from the bourgeois geneticists.
26:23They are agents of our enemies.
26:25They want to starve Russia into submission.
26:30That's not why the giraffe's neck is long.
26:35How could Stalin have fallen for that one?
26:38It was easy.
26:39He desperately wanted to believe it.
26:42Lysenko was peddling the long discredited theory of an early 19th century naturalist named Jean-Baptiste Lamarque.
26:51He believed that acquired characteristics, let's say the length of a giraffe's neck from straining to get at those leaves up high,
26:58could be inherited by the next generation.
27:01He failed to grasp that it took millions of years of evolution and higher survival rates among the generations of giraffes,
27:10with even slightly longer necks, to result in a tall, modern giraffe.
27:15This increasingly long neck of the giraffe was due to random mutations in the genes that happened to lead to a more successful giraffe,
27:24not their neck-stretching exertions.
27:27This had been Charles Darwin's revolutionary insight.
27:32Evolution by natural selection.
27:35Lysenko whispered in Stalin's ear that he could fulfill a centuries-old Russian dream
27:41and end the famine that threatened Stalin's grip on the country.
27:45Lysenko would soak the wheat seeds in ice water so that they could still thrive in the ice and snow,
27:52a process he called vernalization.
27:55Lysenko falsely claimed that the plant's offspring would inherit the resistance to cold.
28:01No time-consuming, painstaking crossbreeding required.
28:05Only one thing stood in his way.
28:08Vavilov and his stubborn adherence to genetics.
28:14The bitter irony was that while Lysenko was spinning fantasies of abundance for Stalin,
28:19Vavilov and his team were crossing wheat species from higher altitudes
28:24that actually would have resulted in heightened food production in Russia.
28:28As Vavilov rushed to the Kremlin, all he could think about was the work that needed to be done.
28:35He was on a collision course that would doom him and countless others to starvation.
28:50Vavilov knew that no man could witness Stalin's fear and expect to live long.
28:56Vavilov.
29:05Nikolai Ivanovich, I tell you, we are in the gravest danger.
29:09Three days ago, the secret police came for Yevgeny and Leonid.
29:14They haven't been hurt from since.
29:16Their wives are frantic.
29:18Lysenko takes every opportunity to blame you for the famine.
29:22I tell you, we must stop the experiments in genetics.
29:28Carry on quietly with your work.
29:30No matter what happens.
29:32We must hurry.
29:33We must be like Michael Faraday, working hard and keeping accurate notes of the results.
29:40If I disappear, then you must take my place.
29:43The only thing that matters is getting the science right.
29:47It is the only hope of ending this famine and all the others to come.
29:52Comrade, they are going to arrest you and all of us.
29:56If we don't want to fight, then we'd better work that much faster.
30:01Stalin's forced collectivization of farms in the Ukraine led to one of the darkest chapters in human history.
30:08It was a famine so severe and widespread that instead of being known by a year and a place, it was given a name all its own.
30:18Holodomor, meaning the extermination by hunger.
30:26Stalin's zeal to push the Kulak peasants off their farms and into factories had become a policy of genocide.
30:33Vavilov and his geneticists continue to speak against you. I cannot bear it.
30:39Stalin knew that getting rid of Vavilov might be trouble.
30:43The global scientific community admired Vavilov for his ideas and his courage.
30:48They had even been willing to move their International Genetics Congress to Moscow when Stalin wouldn't let him travel outside the country.
30:56Discredit Vavilov first. Then you can do with him as you wish.
31:03I regret to report that the biochemists are not yet able to distinguish the lentil from the pea by analyzing their proteins.
31:11I reckon that anyone who tries them on their tongue can tell a lentil from a pea.
31:17Comrade, we are unable to distinguish them chemically.
31:22What's the point of being able to distinguish them chemically if you can try them on your tongue?
31:26Lysenko now mounted a relentless campaign against Vavilov and science.
31:35It came to a head at a two-day conference.
31:38All the scientists and enemies of science gathered to debate the future of Soviet agricultural policy.
31:45Lysenko, you shall soon see how my method of soaking seeds of all kinds in ice water shall lead to a better fed motherland.
31:57What? No experiments? No data?
32:01Perhaps you haven't noticed. Your ranks are thinning.
32:05Vernalization is going to provide a huge winter harvest.
32:09You are either with our plan or...
32:11You can take me to the stake. You can set me on fire.
32:14But you can't make me lie about science.
32:17We've just witnessed a man committing suicide.
32:24He's going to be arrested.
32:26Arrested? For what?
32:27You just wait. That's the last you'll see of this poor brilliant fool.
32:32But Vavilov was no fool.
32:34In preparation for what was coming, he had warned his colleagues that they must ask for transfers to other institutes to save themselves.
32:43His closest colleagues valiantly refused to distance themselves from Vavilov.
32:50Comrade Vavilov, you are needed back in Moscow.
32:53It seems you took some papers that didn't belong to you.
32:57Just let me use the last of the light to finish my work, please.
33:13This looks bad, comrade. Really bad.
33:23You've been up to some serious mischief. You must have known you would be found out sooner or later.
33:28What can you possibly be talking about?
33:30Yes, yes. I'm sure you're completely mystified.
33:34Don't be cute with me. You know why you are here.
33:37You have been arrested as an active participant in a subversive anti-Soviet organization and a spy for foreign intelligence services.
33:45Do you admit your guilt?
33:46No, I do not.
33:48I declare categorically that I have never engaged in espionage or in any other anti-Soviet activity.
33:55The testimonies you cite are of witnesses whom the state has already murdered.
34:00You know I am not a spy.
34:02You know I love my country.
34:05My real crime, my only crime, is a profound difference of scientific opinion.
34:12Vavilov's tormentor had plenty of experience softening up such stubborn subjects.
34:21He started interrogating Vavilov for 10, 12 hours at a time.
34:25Usually rousing him out of his bed in the middle of the night.
34:29He must have been tortured because his legs were so swollen.
34:34He was unable to walk.
34:37Vavilov would be dragged back to his cell and crawl to a place on the floor and just lie there, unable to move.
34:45He kept on for 1700 hours, more than 400 sessions, until Vavilov finally broke.
34:53A year after his arrest, he was sentenced to be shot.
34:58He was taken to the place of his execution, where he languished for months.
35:07Just when things couldn't get any darker, an even greater darkness descended.
35:16Hitler had broken his non-aggression pact with Stalin, sending millions of German troops and thousands of tanks to invade Russia.
35:25But the siege of Leningrad was, by any metric, the most ghastly of all.
35:39This was the world's genetic inheritance.
35:42The seeds of the plants that had sustained us since the invention of agriculture.
35:46And Hitler, unlike Stalin, knew that it was priceless.
35:51This was a great damage set of rulers and the
36:03Oh, Jesus, it was a great yelp.
36:05This was a perfect task of accomplishing the world's life.
36:08This was about for the rest of the world's life.
36:10This had been a great time for him, which was the most powerful for the rest of the world.
36:15We don't even know if he's alive.
36:34Until we do, we must find it within ourselves to do as Nikolai Ivanovich would.
36:41If the siege lasts, our fellow citizens will get very hungry.
36:47This building contains several tons of edible material.
36:52We must figure out how to protect every last seed for the time when the world returns to its senses.
37:01In all of history, no team of scientists has ever been tested so cruelly.
37:07They were pushed beyond the breaking point.
37:11And yet, they did not break.
37:17On Christmas Day alone in 1941, 4,000 people starved to death in Leningrad.
37:25The city had been under siege by Hitler's army for more than 100 days.
37:30The temperature was minus 40 degrees, and the city's entire infrastructure had collapsed.
37:37It was only a matter of time, Hitler thought to himself, before Leningrad succumbed to his will.
37:43No city could endure such suffering for very long.
37:48While Stalin fretted over the safety of the artworks of the Hermitage Museum, he never gave a single thought to Vavilov's seed bank.
37:58But Hitler had already taken the Lou Art Museum of Paris.
38:02He coveted something much more precious.
38:05Vavilov's treasure.
38:07Hitler had established a special tactical unit of the SS, Ruslan Zammelkommando, the Russian collector commandos, to take control of the seed bank and retrieve its living riches for future use by the Third Reich.
38:20They waited at the ready, like a pack of Dobermans straining to be unleashed on the Institute.
38:26The botanists were now down to a ration of two slices of bread per day.
38:31But still, they continued their work.
38:34In a way, the German army was the least of their worries.
38:37If only Vavilov were here, I'd feel so lost without him.
38:49Dear comrade, as painful as it is, we must accept that he is gone forever.
38:56But Vavilov was alive. Barely. He had been moved to another prison in another city.
39:04I am 54 years old, with a vast experience and knowledge in the field of plant breeding.
39:13I would be happy to devote myself entirely to the service of my country.
39:18I request and beg you to allow me to work in my special field, even at the lowest level.
39:26But no answer ever came. The state had decided not to shoot him.
39:31They had a crueler fate in mind for the man who did more than any other to eliminate famine and hunger.
39:37He would be deliberately and slowly starved to death.
39:42800,000 other human beings had starved to death in Leningrad.
39:52Besieged by the German forces from September of 1941 until January of 1944,
39:59the city somehow still managed to hold out against the relentless assault.
40:04The meager rations of two slices of bread a day had run out long before,
40:10and the protectors of Vavilov's treasure began to succumb to hunger amidst the plenty
40:16that their sacred honor prevented them from consuming.
40:19Botanist Alexander Stukin, specialist in groundnuts.
40:26Botanist Alexander Stukin, specialist in groundnuts.
40:44Lilia Rodina, expert on oats.
40:51Dmitri Ivanov, world authority on rice.
41:05The botanists perished from hunger.
41:08And yet, not a grain of rice in the collection was unaccounted for.
41:14And what of Vavilov's nemesis, Trofim Lysenko?
41:35He maintained his death grip on Soviet agriculture and biology for another two decades,
41:41until three of Russia's most distinguished scientists publicly denounced him
41:46for his pseudoscience and his other crimes.
41:50And what of Vavilov's brother, Sergei the physicist?
41:55Stalin made him chairman of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
42:01After Stalin's death and the recognition of the damage he and Lysenko had done to the Soviet Union,
42:07Nikolai Vavilov could once again be talked about in public.
42:12The Institute of Plant Industry was renamed after him.
42:16And it still thrives.
42:18And this is here because of his life and work.
42:22The Zvalbard Global Seed Vault is buried deep beneath the earth at the top of the world.
42:27It can hold four and a half million kinds of seeds underground.
42:32So why didn't the botanists at the Institute eat a single grain of rice?
42:38Why didn't they distribute the seeds and nuts and potatoes to the people of Leningrad,
42:43who were dying of starvation every day for more than two years?
42:47Did you eat today?
42:50If the answer is yes, then you probably ate something that descended from the seeds that the botanists died to protect.
42:59They gave their lives for us.
43:07If only our future was as real and precious to us as it was to them.
43:29The Institute of Penthouse
43:31The Institute of Plant Industry
43:32The Institute of Technology
43:33Nob
43:47THE END