13 November] 1887 – 26 January 1943) was a Russian and Soviet agronomist, botanist and geneticist who identified the centers of origin of cultivated plants.

Vavilov's work was criticized by Trofim Lysenko, whose anti-Mendelian concepts of plant biology had won favor with Joseph Stalin.

[5] His father had grown up in poverty due to recurring crop failures and food rationing, and Vavilov became obsessed from an early age with ending famine.

From 1913 to 1914, he travelled in Europe and studied plant immunity, in collaboration with the British biologist William Bateson, who helped establish the science of genetics.

[1] Throughout his career, Vavilov went on a series of botanical-agronomic expeditions, collecting seeds from many parts of the world, and developing theories of their origins.

[9][10] Later expeditions visited places including the high plains of Central Asia, Afghanistan, the Khoresm oasis, Japan, and Taiwan.

[8] On his way back from America he visited Western Europe, collecting seeds in Britain, France, Holland, Germany, Poland, and Sweden in 1922.

[9] He travelled the Mediterranean in 1926, visiting France, Greece, Spain, Portugal, North Africa and islands including Sardinia, Sicily, Crete, and Cyprus.

[8] He took special interest in legumes such as the chickpea, which he found contributed to soil fertility and added protein to the diets of people and their animals around the Mediterranean.

[14] Vavilov was a man of enormous energy, described as having "a mind that never slept and a body which for its capacity for enduring physical hardships can seldom have been matched.

[16][9] Trofim Lysenko joined the staff of the institute and began to oppose Vavilov, arguing that genetics was nonsense invented by the Roman Catholic monk Gregor Mendel, and proposing his own Lamarckian views of inheritance and evolution, and the idea of improving a crop variety by vernalization.

[5] That marriage ended in divorce in 1926, after which he married geneticist Elena Ivanovna Barulina, a specialist on lentils and assistant head of the institute's seed collection.

A group of scientists at the Vavilov Institute boxed up a cross section of seeds, moved them to the basement, and took shifts protecting them.

Many of the samples were transferred to the Schutzstaffel (SS) Institute for Plant Genetics, which had been established at Schloss Lannach [de] near Graz, Austria.

[24] Vavilov combined the skill of collecting distinct varieties of crop plants with theoretical understanding of their significance in botany and the ability to put this knowledge to practical use.

Vavilov's work has been continued by later botanists at the institute, for example breeding transgressive forms of lupin (a legume) resistant to the fusarium wilt fungus.

[34] That novel was the inspiration for the Decemberists' song "When The War Came" in the 2006 album The Crane Wife,[35] which also depicts the Institute during the siege and mentions Vavilov by name.

[37] In 1990, a six part documentary entitled Nikolai Vavilov (Russian: Николай Вавилов) was created as a joint production of the USSR and East Germany.