The Shocking True Story of the World's First Seed Bank—And The Scientists Who Sacrificed Their Lives to Save It

During World War II, the Soviet city of Leningrad was surrounded, cut off from food supplies for nearly two and a half years. People were desperate: they ate boiled leather, machine oil, toothpaste, and wallpaper paste just to stay alive. But, in the center of the city, a group of botanists spent their days surrounded by food that they refused to touch—nuts, seeds, and even a basement full of potatoes—even as several of them starved to death. The seeds for which these scientists were willing to sacrifice their lives formed the collection of the world's very first seed bank: a library of crop varieties that contained the genetic diversity future generations of plant breeders have relied on to feed the world. In this episode, the story of the almost unimaginable bravery that lies behind the food we eat today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  In June 1941, an early summer sun was warming Leningrad to life after the long winter snow. Then, June 22, from the loudspeakers along the streets came a voice from the Kremlin, far south in Moscow.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Граждане Порецкого союза!

• 0:24Speaker 00

  Today, at 4 a.m., without a declaration of war, German troops attacked our borders at many points and bombed our city from the air.

• 0:34Nicola Twilley?

  That's right, you're listening to Gastropod, the podcast about the Second World War. Wait, what?

• 0:40Cynthia Graber?

  Yes, this is still Gastropod, the podcast about the science and history of food, not military history. I'm Cynthia Graber.

• 0:46Nicola Twilley?

  And I'm Nicola Twilley, and this episode, we are in fact going to be spending some time in the 1940s in Leningrad, which is now known as St. Petersburg in Russia. But it's because we're telling an incredible story about the world's very first seed bank and the heroic botanists who saved it even while they starved.

• 1:05Cynthia Graber?

  Today, we know that seed banks are critical to keeping us from starving. For instance, there are tens of thousands of varieties of wheat, and maybe only one of them that only historically grew in one country is, say, resistant to a particular fungus, and that variety might help scientists today breed a new fungus-resistant, modern variety that could help prevent a harvest from being destroyed.

• 1:26Nicola Twilley?

  This still happens all the time. The rice harvest in Southeast Asia is, say, being wiped out by an insect-borne virus, and plant breeders turn to the collections in seed banks to find the one or two wild rice relatives that are resistant to the virus that bug is carrying. They breed that resistance into commercial varieties and basically save one of the world's staple foods.

• 1:49Cynthia Graber?

  This is a real example that happened in the 1960s. One rice variety, originally from central India, was resistant to a virus that was wiping out harvests. Pretty much all the rice grown in Asia today is a descendant of that variety.

• 2:01Nicola Twilley?

  So seed banks really matter. And the story we have for you this episode is about the truly innovative team of scientists who founded the world's first seed bank. Scientists who then had to wrestle with how to deal with an unimaginably difficult situation. And an almost impossible personal sacrifice.

• 2:20Cynthia Graber?

  We think you'll love it, but we did want to give you a quick content warning. This is a story about a siege during which hundreds of thousands of people died. So certainly there will be mentions of people starving to death. We're not going to be particularly graphic this episode, but there are tales of desperation. Just wanted you to know in advance.

• 2:36Nicola Twilley?

  Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater.

• 2:44Speaker 04

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• 3:26Speaker 04

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• 4:05Nicola Twilley?

  Let's start this story by meeting one of its heroes, Nikolai Bavelov.

• 4:10Speaker 05

  He was firstly, I think, just a natural explorer. He loved to travel. He used to tell his friends and his students, you know, if you have any money in your pocket, you should travel. That's what you should do.

• 4:20Cynthia Graber?

  Simon Parkin is the author of the new book, The Forbidden Garden. He told us that Bavelov didn't travel a lot as a kid. He grew up poor and in fact, he and his family often were hungry because of recurring famines in Russia. And so at a very early age, he decided to become a botanist and learn about plants that could help Russia feed itself.

• 4:37Nicola Twilley?

  Vavilov actually wrote his PhD dissertation on snails. Yes, gastropods. Although he regarded them as pests because they do like to dine on tender seedlings and vegetable leaves.

• 4:50Cynthia Graber?

  He graduated from the university in 1910 and he basically immediately started to head out on all sorts of botanical seed collecting expeditions.

• 4:57Speaker 05

  So he travels to India, Afghanistan, South Korea, he goes to Japan, he picks flax from Iran, orange and lemon pips on the road to Kabul. When he goes to Tokyo, he finds chrysanthemums and brings those back to Russia and sweet potatoes from Taiwan.

• 5:18Nicola Twilley?

  Vavilov's priority was always food crops. And when he went to, say, the Middle East to collect wheat and barley, he didn't just bring back the seeds that people were growing in the fields.

• 5:28Speaker 05

  His theory was, well, if I visit wild landscapes, climb up mountains, things like that, go looking for these wild varieties that have been overlooked by our ancestors, perhaps I'll be able to find, for example, wheat plants that are particularly resistant to the cold or to pests or other things like that.

• 5:48Cynthia Graber?

  And Vavilov didn't choose his destinations randomly, or maybe because he heard there were beautiful mountains to climb in the area. Based on his understanding of the fairly recent science of plant genetics, he developed a theory, and now we know it to be true. He believes that each family of plants has a kind of home base called a center of origin.

• 6:06Speaker 05

  Vavilov's theory was that there were a certain number of centers of plant diversity around the world where certain types of plants originated and then over the centuries had spread out from there.

• 6:19Nicola Twilley?

  This idea was a major contribution to plant science. And following on from it, Vavilov realized that if he went to a particular crop's center of origin. That's where you'd find the most genetic diversity.

• 6:30Cynthia Graber?

  And of course, the maximum genetic diversity is what you're looking for if you're trying to collect rare genes that might be really valuable in the future for plant breeders who are trying to save a crop from pests and diseases, or help it adapt to, say, less water or warmer conditions.

• 6:44Nicola Twilley?

  According to Vavilov's center of origin theory, if the potato originally comes from Peru, that meant you needed to go to Peru to find all the most wild and wonderful potatoes. So he did.

• 6:55Cynthia Graber?

  Vavilov sent seeds and samples from all over the world back to Russia. He met botanists from around the world. He was building up his reputation. And so in 1921, he got recruited to a new job.

• 7:06Speaker 05

  He was asked to take over the Plant Institute, this fairly short-running, short-lived institute in the middle of Petrograd, which is what the city now known as St. Petersburg was known at the time. And during the Soviet Union era, it was known as Leningrad, confusingly. But we're talking about the same city.

• 7:26Nicola Twilley?

  The Plant Institute was also not known as the Plant Institute at the time, but never mind. The institution itself had been set up in the 1890s as a kind of agricultural research center, charged with identifying and tackling pests and diseases, and also finding and developing new and better crops. Along the way, it had built up a decent collection of local seeds.

• 7:49Speaker 05

  I think around 14,000 varieties of predominantly wheat and barley, oat and rice. So these were, you know, field crops had been collected by the people running the institute at that time. And they had written to their colleagues around predominantly just Russia, asking them to send any samples of seeds that were used in their localities.

• 8:12Cynthia Graber?

  It sounds like it was a promising little institution for Vavilov to take over. He had been teaching at a university far from Leningrad, and he brought some of his students with him to help him run the place.

• 8:21Speaker 05

  And they turn up at the Plant Institute to see what the state is and find it has been essentially looted. And most of the samples that had been collected there have actually been eaten by either staff or raiders who have come in who are looking for food.

• 8:39Nicola Twilley?

  Russia had been through a lot of famines, like we said. And right before Vavilov showed up in Leningrad, things had been a little unstable, to say the least. The Tsar was overthrown and murdered in 1917, and then there was a civil war, which Lenin and his communist followers had won, but the country's harvests had taken a huge hit in the meanwhile.

• 9:00Cynthia Graber?

  And so the people who had been working at the Plant Institute ate the collection. They probably thought it was either that or starve.

• 9:06Nicola Twilley?

  The building itself was also trashed. The pipes had burst, the furniture had been chopped up for firewood. It was a mess. So Vavilov quickly finagled his way into a fancy new building in a prime location, right next to the Hermitage Museum, one of the world's most famous art museums. It was a declaration of ambition.

• 9:25Speaker 05

  It's a three-story 19th century former Tsarist palace. So it's a very, you know, relatively grand building with lots of rooms, lots of space. And, you know, from the seeds of ruin, this is really what Vavilov and his team immediately start to do is they're going to start building up the collection, going out into the world, collecting samples wherever they can find them, with the aim of establishing the world's first seed bank, taking over this very young institute and filling it with seeds, not only from all around Russia, the Soviet Union, but also from all around the world.

• 10:01Cynthia Graber?

  Nobody had ever done this before. No one had had a vision for a library of seeds from around the world that would help collect and protect genetic diversity with the goal of helping farmers and crop breeders in the future. But Vavilov didn't need a model for it. He just set out traveling the world, meeting with local farmers, searching for a wide variety of crops from basically everywhere. And he only took samples and seeds that locals gave him voluntarily.

• 10:23Nicola Twilley?

  Vavilov's idea was that the seed bank was basically a treasure trove of useful genes that had to be preserved so that botanists could draw on them to breed new and improved crops. And this was an urgent task. Vavilov knew that farming techniques and soil nutrients mattered for the size of the harvest, but the actual genetics of the crop could make a huge difference, too. The right genes could boost the harvest by as much as 25%, and that could be enough to prevent thousands, even millions, of his fellow Russians from starving.

• 10:55Cynthia Graber?

  Vavilov went on more than 100 expeditions to 64 countries. He collected 150,000 unique varieties of seeds and tubers, examples of things like radishes, soybeans, barley, wheat, edible lilies.

• 11:09Speaker 05

  They had, I think, around 6,000 varieties of potatoes, although it's astonishing to me that there are that many different varieties of potato in the world. And yeah, so it's a very substantial collection. The seeds are kept in tins, sort of little miniature bunkers. They're catalogued, they're stacked in the rooms. It's a very well organised collection. So it doesn't take long. It's really, yeah, 10 to 15 years and it really becomes a very serious collection that's world renowned.

• 11:39Nicola Twilley?

  Like Simon says, by the mid 1930s, Vavilov had made the Plant Institute into what other scientists referred to as the world collection of plants. The Times of London wrote that it was, quote, unrivalled in completeness by any other collection in the world, in part because there was nothing else quite like it in the world.

• 12:00Speaker 05

  Of course, there were herbariums and other kinds of collections of plants. And plant matter, of course, that's a very long running thing that had been going for centuries. But yeah, this idea of a living library, an encyclopedia of living plants that are sorted, that are catalogued, that are replenished when they need to be. Vavilov's institute is the first instance of that.

• 12:22Cynthia Graber?

  As Simon said, Vavilov's success with the Plant Institute was impressively fast and he attracted a lot of attention. But not all of it was positive. By this point Lenin was dead. He died soon after Vavilov took over the institute and Stalin was in charge.

• 12:35Speaker 05

  Stalin is also hugely distrustful of Vavilov's reputation and how he is becoming very well known. Vavilov is an open hearted, has an open hearted approach to international collaboration. He's wanting to work with foreign scientists. And this is something that Stalin is distrustful of, as well as, you know, all of the awards that are being heaped upon Vavilov's shoulders.

• 13:01Nicola Twilley?

  Stalin was not a share the love kind of guy. And agriculture was a little bit of a sore spot for him anyway, because his policies had ended up causing huge famines in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Millions of people had starved to death.

• 13:16Cynthia Graber?

  But as it happens, there was another plant scientist whose theories were kind of opposite to Vavilov's and they were much more up Stalin's alley. His name was Trofim Lysenko. And whereas Vavilov came from a pretty educated background, his family was peasant stock.

• 13:29Nicola Twilley?

  Which made him automatically more appealing to the communist leadership. Plus, there was the fact that his ideas about how to build better crops were ideologically very in line with communist thought.

• 13:41Speaker 05

  Lysenko. Had a different theory that he named after himself, Lysenkoism. And his idea was that plants would acquire the characteristics of the situation into which they were planted. So if you put a plant into a hardy, difficult area, it will acquire those qualities needed to survive in that, in that area.

• 14:01Cynthia Graber?

  So what Lysenko was saying was that if you take wheat that's growing in a warm area and stick it in a cold area, the next generation of wheat will grow up to become cold tolerant.

• 14:10Nicola Twilley?

  Vavilov knew, as we do today, that that kind of evolutionary adaptation actually takes a long time, like a really long time. And so a plant breeder who wants to make great wheat that's also cold tolerant in a human lifetime can't wait for evolution. Instead, they need to find a variety that grows happily in the cold and then breed those genes into the non-cold tolerant but otherwise great variety.

• 14:33Cynthia Graber?

  But Lysenko thought that was bunk. And so, of course, he thought, and then Stalin agreed with him, he thought Vavilov's expeditions to far-off cold climates were expensive and unnecessary.

• 14:43Speaker 05

  As well as his theories resonating with communist ideals at the time, Lysenko also predicts that he will be able to increase the grain yield of Soviet farmers in around half the time that Vavilov estimates his work will reap those kind of rewards. So this is, of course, hugely attractive to Stalin. So I think some of these things, to a certain degree, doom Vavilov's prospects as the 30s roll on.

• 15:11Nicola Twilley?

  Not that Vavilov was daunted by falling out of favor. He just kept going on expeditions and collecting seeds at his usual pace, until one expedition to Ukraine to collect wheat in 1940, when three black sedans, full of men in uniform, pulled up to where he was staying.

• 15:28Speaker 05

  And they say, you know, where is Vavilov? Vavilov's called over and they say, Vavilov, you're needed in Moscow on urgent business. You need to come with us, get into the car. Of course, it's a ruse and the men have not come to collect him for those reasons. They're members of the NKVD, which is the precursor to the KGB. And so they'd been sent to arrest Favelov and he's, he's taken to prison. He's subjected to extremely long and intense interrogations, really with the purpose of extracting a false confession from him.

• 16:02Cynthia Graber?

  The torture itself was horrible and also people knew that their loved ones could be hurt too if they didn't confess to this proto-KGB. So they often did. Favelov did. He confessed to spying for the British.

• 16:13Speaker 05

  Part of the reason, he explains that he's been travelling so much is because for this reason, for reasons of espionage, which is not true. And so as a result of that, Favelov very quickly is put on trial and sentenced to death. That sentence is commuted eventually to 20 years hard labour, but he is essentially taken off the scene.

• 16:37Cynthia Graber?

  While he was enduring hard labour over those couple of years, both the city and the seed bank faced an existential threat to their survival, the siege of Leningrad. That story's coming up after the break.

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• 18:07Speaker 00

  Daily, indeed almost hourly, the menacing shadow crept closer and closer to the city. The bombers came to break the spirit of the people. Hospitals, theatres, homes and treasure houses. No target mattered, only terror if it could be roused.

• 18:25Nicola Twilley?

  By summer 1941, Britain and France had been fighting World War II against Nazi Germany for almost a couple of years already. But Russia, or the Soviet Union as it was at the time, had not been involved in the fight. In fact, if anything, it had been on the side of the Nazis. The Soviets had been actively supplying food and oil and other necessities to the Germans.

• 18:47Speaker 05

  There was an uneasy alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union from the outbreak of the Second World War, which seems perhaps strange because you've got the, obviously, the Nazis on the far right and Stalin's regime on the far left. So it's a strange alliance and I think it was characterized by a lot of distrust and an understanding that this arrangement was not going to hold over the long term. But certainly, you know, throughout 1940, in theory, the two nations are allies.

• 19:17Nicola Twilley?

  But this changed in 1941. Hitler had other ideas. He wanted to own the production of all that food himself and he wanted access to the Soviet oil fields and he wanted space for Germans to live and take over as the master race. This wasn't a huge secret and so whispers of a planned Nazi invasion did make it to Stalin.

• 19:34Speaker 05

  But for whatever reason, Stalin chooses not to listen to this advice and in some cases actively punishes his spies for reporting this information to him. So in the summer of 1941, when the German forces invade the Soviet Union, they're invading a country that's not prepared at all.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  In the first week of the war, the enemy struck hard a beat into the Soviet lands. Men of the Red Army fought as men have never fought in history. They died in thousands where they stood stubbornly. Yet still, the flood poured on. And still more and more of Russia passed into the black shadows.

• 20:16Nicola Twilley?

  In reality, despite the bombastic tone of this British documentary from the 1940s, the Russians were barely able to put up a fight. And so the Germans had no trouble gaining more and more Russian territory.

• 20:28Cynthia Graber?

  And the territory they were particularly interested in included Leningrad.

• 20:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, so there were obviously two major targets for Hitler. Moscow as the new capital of the country and Leningrad as the old capital of the country. And Leningrad was really the, it was seen as the hotbed of communism, where it had the, the revolution had arisen out of this city. It was a cosmopolitan place, was to some degree, you know, marked by its liberal intelligentsia. It represented lots of things that Hitler wanted to attack, I think, and symbolically wanted to take off the map.

• 21:10Nicola Twilley?

  Also, more practically speaking, it had a lot of factories, a lot of shipyards, some major steel and arms manufacturers, and it was the home of Russia's Baltic fleet, as well as a key strategic port for Allied supply lines.

• 21:22Speaker 05

  And so the directive comes from Hitler to his senior officers that no unit is to advance on Moscow until Leningrad has fallen.

• 21:33Speaker 00

  Overnight, a rich and flourishing countryside became an inhospitable desert. But hour by hour, the menace came closer to Leningrad.

• 21:41Cynthia Graber?

  Just like Russia itself, the city of Leningrad was totally unprepared.

• 21:45Speaker 05

  Well, so I mean, some of the problem for both the residents of Leningrad and the people administering the city is that there's so little straightforward news coming to them about the German advance. So there is a network of loudspeakers throughout the city and there are regular broadcasts given to people that are sort of informing them supposedly about the progress of, of the war. But they're sort of used as propaganda really to say, oh, you know, the- The Germans are advancing, but still there's that we, the Russian people, are winning the war kind of thing.

• 22:20Nicola Twilley?

  Some civic leaders pretty reasonably wanted to know what the plan was for evacuation. They called the Soviet leadership in Moscow repeatedly, but no one seemed to have a plan.

• 22:31Cynthia Graber?

  One of those civic institutions was the Hermitage Museum. As we said, it was right across the square from the Plant Institute, and the director there was a guy named Joseph Orbeli.

• 22:39Speaker 05

  And in fact, Orbeli does not receive a very clear directive from Moscow to do this on the on the moment of invasion. He just takes matters into his own hands. He does try to contact Moscow, I think, multiple times, can't get through, and so just decides to act on his his own will.

• 22:57Nicola Twilley?

  The Hermitage was a pretty well-funded museum, and Orbeli put his team to work, making crates and packing up the most important items in the collection.

• 23:06Speaker 05

  It's only within two or three weeks that the first train loaded with Hermitage treasures departs the city. So, yeah, he he works quicker than any other director of any other museum or academic institution in Leningrad to to get the stuff out of Leningrad. And it's carried on trains across the country and and hidden in the Ural Mountains.

• 23:31Cynthia Graber?

  The plan and the evacuation worked. Orbeli is credited with saving all the treasures of the Hermitage Museum from Nazi looting. But across the square, things were not going so well.

• 23:40Nicola Twilley?

  The Plant Institute also held priceless treasures, but it was lacking both leadership and funding.

• 23:46Speaker 05

  They're trying to find out what's happened to Vavilov, those who are loyal to him. And it's a very fraught situation without clear leadership. And by this point, Stalin has reduced the amount of funding coming into the Plant Institute.

• 24:00Cynthia Graber?

  While Vavilov was gone, a botanist named Nikolai Ivanov was running the place. He was a close friend of Vavilov's, and he happened to be the institute's bean expert.

• 24:09Speaker 05

  He is really uncertain of what to do, whether they should start taking matters into their own hands. They have nearly, by this point, quarter of a million seeds and plants in tins, some of which are irreplaceable because the habitats that they were harvested from are no longer around, and they decide to wait for. Official word on what they should do because along with that official word, they're expecting to get some help packaging up all of the samples and putting them into the crates that are going to be provided. They don't have any of these materials to hand.

• 24:44Nicola Twilley?

  So while Ivanov's friend Orbeli at the art museum was packing up and shipping out, the botanists at the plant institute kind of dithered.

• 24:53Speaker 05

  So they wait and wait and wait really till the 11th hour when they finally receive word that the plant institute is to be evacuated, not just the samples, but also most of the staff who are working there are told that they're assigned two carriages on a train that's also carrying materials from other institutes across the city. And there's not enough room on the train for everything in the collection, but they select samples from each of the important collections to go on to the train. But because it's been left so late, the train, which leaves in late August 1941, makes very haltering progress out of the city and is stopped.

• 25:36Cynthia Graber?

  By this point, the Nazis were so close to the city that they'd captured the train line. It was impossible to get the seeds out that way. And all the scientists turned around and went right back.

• 25:45Nicola Twilley?

  And then by September, it was all over. The Nazis had surrounded the city.

• 25:50Speaker 05

  They have the advantage. They've encircled most of Leningrad and they occupy most of the suburbs as well. By this point, they have artillery positions in the hills bordering Leningrad. And so the decision is made just to hunker down and bed in and essentially barrage the city with a mixture of artillery shells and to wait it out, really starve the city into submission, which is of course a military tactic that's been used for thousands of years.

• 26:22Cynthia Graber?

  As we've said, the citizens of Leningrad weren't prepared. They hadn't stocked up much food because they hadn't been told to be worried about the Nazis. And the city hadn't bothered to do that as a government act because they were exporting a lot of food to the Nazis. They had less than a month's supply in city warehouses.

• 26:37Nicola Twilley?

  Then, when the siege began and the Nazis started shelling the city for up to 18 hours at a time, one of the very first bombs actually hit the warehouses where that supply was stored, and it all went up in flames.

• 26:50Cynthia Graber?

  And because the city was literally circled by Nazis, there was almost no way for food to get in. There were a few planes that could fly in for a little while at the beginning with some supplies, but barely any new food got in after the Nazis started their siege.

• 27:02Nicola Twilley?

  But of course, there were 3 million citizens who needed to eat. So almost immediately rationing was introduced, and then rations were cut, and then rations were cut again.

• 27:14Speaker 05

  And so they are below the level that is required to sustain a human life on a weekly basis.

• 27:21Cynthia Graber?

  The mainstay of the rations was bread, and by November of 1941, bread was rationed at six slices for workers and three slices for everyone else. Not per meal, per day. If people got their full rations, which didn't always happen, that was only about 460 calories total for the whole day, which is practically nothing.

• 27:39Speaker 05

  So really, by November 1941, this is just two months after the siege begins, many people in the city are actively starving to death, including people who were working at the Plant Institute.

• 27:51Nicola Twilley?

  It did not take long for people trapped in Leningrad to start doing basically anything to get hold of something to eat.

• 27:58Speaker 05

  And things that before people considered of great value now are of very little value compared to, say, a loaf of bread. So a bartering system soon comes up in the city, and people would put up notices saying, "I'll trade you my sewing machine for a loaf of bread or for your ration," or whatever it might be.

• 28:19Cynthia Graber?

  Simon told us people traded things like a gold watch for a handful of turnips that someone had stockpiled, or a Persian rug for a chocolate bar that had been stashed away. And they farged for things that previously wouldn't have been considered food.

• 28:32Nicola Twilley?

  Like there's this one story of kids going through their Christmas decorations from the year before to eat the dried walnuts that had been garlanded around the tree.

• 28:41Speaker 05

  And, you know, unfortunately, it's not long before people start to butcher their, their pets. Sometimes to make that easier, they would trade pets with, with those of their neighbours.

• 28:53Nicola Twilley?

  People ate anything, glue, cough medicine, machine oil, anything that might have some calories in it.

• 29:00Speaker 05

  To give you an example of what they were eating within the seed bank as a treat, Dr Ivanov gives some leather straps to some of the, I think, two of the women workers and says, look, boil these up in water to make a kind of soup. So this is what's been classed as food in these circumstances.

• 29:19Nicola Twilley?

  On top of that, it was an incredibly cold winter with temperatures so low that airplanes couldn't fly, machines couldn't start up, your breath would immediately turn into a cloud of crystals.

• 29:29Speaker 05

  So you're using additional calories just to keep your body at the temperature it needs to be to function, just because of how cold it is. So some staff members move into the building so they don't have to be going to and from their apartments.

• 29:42Nicola Twilley?

  And like Simon said, pretty soon, people in Leningrad started to die of starvation. The young and old and physically frail first, and then everyone, including the staff of the Plant Institute. At the start of the siege, about fifty botanists worked there.

• 29:58Speaker 05

  And so, yeah, the first staff members at the Plant Institute succumbed to starvation in, in November and pretty soon, more than a dozen people have, have died.

• 30:09Nicola Twilley?

  But here's the thing, they were actually surrounded by edible food. They had tons and tons of tubers like potatoes and seeds, and most of those seeds would have been edible too. Most seeds are edible. In fact, they're often among the most nutritious parts of a plant because they're meant to nourish a baby plant. So those Plant Institute botanists that were dying of starvation were dying while they were literally working with food.

• 30:34Speaker 05

  One of the most moving stories, I think, is of Alexander Stuchkin, who was a ground nut expert, who Dr Ivanov discovers one day, I think on Christmas Day, in fact, nineteen forty-one, he knocks on his office door, doesn't hear a reply, goes in, sees Stuchkin slumped at his desk and goes over and tries to rouse him. And it's clear that Stuchkin has died, but a packet of almonds falls from his hand onto his desk and Shows that he'd been working, you know, still cataloguing the seeds and nuts that he worked with even at this point. And, you know, working with samples that at least could have extended his life for a little bit longer. And this illustrates really the the fundamental

• 31:20Speaker 05

  decision that the botanists had to make.

• 31:22Cynthia Graber?

  The fundamental decision. This is the centre of what all of the people who worked at the Plant Institute grappled with, whether to eat the fruits of decades of hard work or not to eat it, to save it to be a resource, to help feed the future of all of humanity.

• 31:37Speaker 05

  They are here in a city that's starving to death. They themselves are starving to death, while surrounded by seeds and nuts and tubers that could have certainly extended their lives and the lives of other citizens around them. And this was a debate that we know that they had. What should they do? Should they eat the collection? Should they distribute it to people who need it to survive? Or should they preserve the collection for the future so that when the siege breaks, they can start to, you know, continue their work and they can plant the fields with the the fruits of their labours in order to feed a nation rather than just a handful of individuals? So this is really the the ethical dilemma that they're faced with in the midst of these

• 32:21Speaker 05

  terrible circumstances.

• 32:23Nicola Twilley?

  As we said, right before Vavilov took over at the Plant Institute, back when it was just a small collection of seeds, one of Russia's many famines had struck Leningrad, and the scientists working at the Plant Institute at the time had eaten their collection. Those empty tins and boxes were what Vavilov and his team found when they first arrived in the city back in 1921.

• 32:45Cynthia Graber?

  To Vavilov and his colleagues, this experience was a cautionary tale. They pledged never to do the same, never to sacrifice the survival of future generations that way. They saw their collection as an irreplaceable buffer against future famines that could be caused by weather or pests or floods. And so eating it to save their own lives would simply be immoral.

• 33:05Speaker 05

  It's clear that there were some debates had, but ultimately the the leaders of the group take charge and say, no, we're we're going to preserve our scientific work here.

• 33:14Nicola Twilley?

  This was honestly a heroic decision. These botanists were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of the future. But they weren't the only ones who wanted to get at all this food. That story after the break.

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• 34:48Cynthia Graber?

  When it came to protecting their precious seeds and tubers, it wasn't like the team at the Plant Institute made the decision not to eat them and so that was it, the collection would be safe. For one thing, the city and their neighborhood was constantly getting bombed by the Nazis. Plant Institute staff would sometimes be on the roof trying to put out any small fires. They had to protect the building from all the usual ravages of war.

• 35:08Nicola Twilley?

  But they also had to protect the contents of the building. First of all, from themselves. They had collectively decided not to eat any of the seeds, but the temptation must have been immense for people who were literally starving to death.

• 35:22Speaker 05

  They gather the collection, these tins, and they put them into just two of the rooms in the seed bank. And these rooms are locked and you're not allowed to go and check the supplies unless you're accompanied by a colleague. So I think they're just implementing some... Accountability measures to make sure that, you know, if you're in there, you're not going to be tempted.

• 35:43Cynthia Graber?

  And then, of course, anyone else in the city who knew what was there, well, they'd have wanted to eat it. At one point, someone broke in through the boarded up windows and stole several hundred bags of seeds, so the staff just sealed everything up more tightly.

• 35:54Nicola Twilley?

  Humans were not the only ones interested in this potential food source. With all the cats in the city gone and no waste food going into the garbage, Leningrad's rat population was also desperate.

• 36:07Speaker 05

  And they are able to smell presumably the collection in the plant institute. And so during the winter of 1941, the building is assaulted by rats. So they take some aluminium sheets off the roof of the building and bring those down into the two rooms where the collection has been predominantly stored. And they put the aluminium over the tins.

• 36:30Cynthia Graber?

  Which was pretty effective. And then, after a few months, there were basically no more rats to fight off. Historians think they were wiped out by starvation.

• 36:37Nicola Twilley?

  But keeping seeds and tubers safe for the future in a seed bank isn't only a matter of putting them in boxes and stopping anyone or anything from eating them. They also need to be stored in the right conditions so that they remain viable, so that if you plant them in the future, they'll still sprout and grow.

• 36:55Cynthia Graber?

  Some seeds can survive being frozen, but not seed potatoes. Potatoes have to be kept at temperatures above freezing.

• 37:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, I mean, firewood is really at a premium in Leningrad by December 1941. And most things that can be burnt have been burns. And so, you know, not only are the scientists within the building sort of freezing, you know, they're given very small allocations of fuel each day. And they only allow themselves certain times when they'll burn it in their stoves. But, um. Some of this fuel that they're given, they decide to apportion to keep in the potato collection alive.

• 37:35Nicola Twilley?

  Remember, it was so cold that planes couldn't fly, but these scientists still decided to give up their precious warmth in order to make sure the potato collection didn't freeze.

• 37:45Cynthia Graber?

  But another thing about potatoes is that you can't just store them for years like you can with some seeds. You have to replant them every single year. A tuber can't survive more than one year in storage.

• 37:55Nicola Twilley?

  The Plant Institute had some fields just on the outskirts of the city that they used for this replanting process. So come spring 1942, the botanists realized they somehow had to get to those fields and plant their potatoes, or else all their sacrifice of not eating them and preventing them from freezing would have been in vain.

• 38:15Speaker 05

  So the potato collection, they plant out in a field, sort of more in the suburban areas, but still, of course, not within German-held territory, but only a mile or two from the German positions.

• 38:27Cynthia Graber?

  They were being shelled. They tended to plant at night to keep it as secret as possible. They had to fend off thieves. But ultimately, they were successful. Only one of the rare varieties did not survive. All the rest regrew.

• 38:38Nicola Twilley?

  At the same time, as temperatures finally warmed up, the botanists found a new role, helping their fellow citizens forage and grow as much food as possible within the city itself.

• 38:49Speaker 05

  As we move into the spring of 1942, things do gradually start to change. The fortunes of the city start to change. Partly, that's just the arrival of spring and the fact that now the sun is out and there are wild plants starting to grow, some of which are edible. And the seed bank staff find a renewed purpose because now they can go out, they can instruct people on how to make the most use of public green spaces. And so the botanists who have survived the first winter do take on this role. They're helping to instruct people on which wild plants are poisonous and which to avoid.

• 39:28Cynthia Graber?

  The summer gave all the people of Leningrad the critical opportunity to carefully nurture and harvest everything edible and more fully prepare for the next winter, because the siege did not end after one year.

• 39:39Nicola Twilley?

  In fact, it went on through that summer of 1942, through the next winter and spring and summer of 1943, and even that winter. Potatoes have to be planted out every year, but seeds last a little longer. Some can last hundreds of years. Still, normally, seedbank seeds are planted out and regenerated on a regular schedule.

• 40:01Cynthia Graber?

  Which raises the question, for the seeds that might normally be planted like every couple of years, were they still good? Would they germinate if they were planted? Because if not, they could and should be eaten.

• 40:11Nicola Twilley?

  Simon says this was definitely something the botanist debated. Were these seeds really still viable?

• 40:17Speaker 05

  You know, of course, there's no way to know unless you you plant the seed and wait and see. So I think that argument is pretty quickly quashed by Ivanov and his other senior colleagues who say, you know, well, if even if among this collection of 20 seeds, one of them remains viable, then we need to keep them all because how else will we know? So we're going to choose not to touch any of them, just in case.

• 40:42Nicola Twilley?

  At one point during the siege, a few botanists made it out on a temporary ice road across a lake. One of them reached safety, but as he was eating his very first meal, he died from starvation. When the nurse unbuttoned his shirt, she found four pounds of wheat seeds he'd brought with him to safety and died rather than eaten. But at least the seeds were now securely behind the lines to be stored for the future.

• 41:07Cynthia Graber?

  The siege lasted a full two and a half years. This is considered the longest and most destructive siege in modern history. It destroyed much of the city. There are conflicting numbers about how many people died, but it's many hundreds of thousands. Basically, one in three people died. And then finally, the Soviet forces turned things around. They pushed through the Nazi barricade, and the city was freed.

• 41:28Speaker 05

  For the plant institute staff, this is obviously, well, as for every citizen in Leningrad, it's a it's a moment of huge triumph and celebration. Of course, the Second World War is still rolling on until 1945. But essentially, for most of the people living in the city, this is when it effectively ends.

• 41:47Nicola Twilley?

  Ultimately, more than a third of the plant institute staff died during the siege. But what about the seeds they had died trying to save?

• 41:55Speaker 05

  There are samples that are evacuated, there are some coming back that had previously made it out one way or another. And so, yes, it's quite difficult to know exactly what was saved and what from the collection remained viable. What we do know, certainly from Plant Institute's own statistics, is that by 1967, 100 million acres of Russian agricultural land had been planted with seeds that were derived from the collection. And by 1979, that area had almost doubled. And today, 90% of the seeds and crops held in St. Petersburg are found in no other scientific collections in the world.

• 42:34Cynthia Graber?

  Seed banks sprouted after World War II, inspired in large part by this first one in Leningrad and the heroic tale of the people who saved it. But that doesn't mean other banks have replicated the Plant Institute's collection. As Simon says, 90% of their seeds aren't found anywhere else.

• 42:49Speaker 05

  This makes a strong case that the botanists made the correct decision, that their decision to sacrifice themselves and their colleagues and the people around them was the ethical one.

• 43:00Nicola Twilley?

  But so what about Vavilov, the man who had the vision for what became the world's very first seed bank?

• 43:07Cynthia Graber?

  It turns out that after Vavilov was arrested and sentenced to decades of hard labour, he didn't even last two years. He died in a prison labour camp while the siege of Leningrad was still going on.

• 43:17Nicola Twilley?

  But no one, his family, his colleagues, his admirers overseas, none of them had any idea what had happened to him until quite a bit later.

• 43:25Cynthia Graber?

  And all that time, the Russian government officially considered him a traitor. Stalin hated him, the secret police forced a false confession from him, he died having confessed to being a spy, which, as we know, was not true.

• 43:37Nicola Twilley?

  But as the story of the heroic sacrifice of Vavilov's colleagues at the Plant Institute gradually trickled out, high-profile scientists in the West started to ask questions about what had happened to Vavilov himself.

• 43:51Speaker 05

  And I think as a result of that story becoming better known in the West, that puts pressure on the Russian government to start to acknowledge what happened to Vavilov and to start to hold him up no longer as a spy and a traitor, as he had been branded by Stalin's regime, but as a hero and as a... Hugely important figure in Russian science. And that does start to happen. And eventually, a crater on the moon is named after Vavlov. And he's put on the stamp as well and commemorated to a certain degree.

• 44:25Nicola Twilley?

  That said, and even though the Plant Institute still has a hugely important library of seeds, many of which are found nowhere else in the world. Well, it does look like history is repeating itself, at least a little bit.

• 44:36Speaker 05

  There have been controversies or, you know, reports certainly that it is underfunded and that the pay for working at the Plant Institute is very low. And the lifts don't work. And I think a former director has gone on the record saying that, you know, the, the whole building needs fireproofing because it's, you know, at risk of burning down. And so, yes, you know, certainly it seems as though the work that's happening there is as politicized as it ever has been.

• 45:05Nicola Twilley?

  But in a world where crop breeders are struggling to keep up with the extreme conditions that are a result of climate change, the DNA in the Leningrad seeds and tubers might still make the difference between a harvest or hunger. And that's why this story still resonates so strongly today.

• 45:24Speaker 05

  This is a story of ordinary people doing something heroic and incredible and making extremely difficult decisions in extreme circumstances. I think, you know, there's a deeper question underpinning all of this of, what, what is permissible in the name of science? What long-term gains and benefits are you willing to make short-term sacrifices for? But certainly, the people who took those decisions believed that they were doing the right thing, believed that it was actually no choice at all, that it would have been impossible for them to eat the work that they had spent

• 46:06Speaker 05

  all those years on and to betray the memory of their colleagues who had died already protecting the seed bank.

• 46:15Nicola Twilley?

  One thing to note as this episode is released, among the hundreds of thousands of government workers fired without notice by Trump's administration are USDA Agricultural Research Service staff that work with the US seed banks. So Russia is not the only place politicizing this kind of essential work.

• 46:33Cynthia Graber?

  Thanks this episode to Simon Parkin. His new book is called The Forbidden Garden: The Botanists of Besieged Leningrad and Their Impossible Choice.

• 46:41Nicola Twilley?

  You can find a link to it on our website, gastropod.com, where you can also sign up as a special supporter to receive our supporters-only newsletter, which has the story of the Nazi who managed to get hold of some of the Leningrad seeds and the mystery of what happened next.

• 46:58Cynthia Graber?

  Thanks as always to our fantastic producer Claudia Geib. We'll be back in just a couple of weeks with a brand new episode. Till then.

• 47:06Speaker 06

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• 47:36Speaker 07

  As wish lists grow, you know where to go. Head to Ulta Beauty. We have gifts they'll love from brands like Tato One and Rare Beauty by Selena Gomez. Shop beauty faves to give or keep from Shark Beauty, Sol de Janeiro, and more. Not sure what they want? You can't go wrong with Balmain, Clinique, or Redken. And don't forget to put yourself on the list. Book a salon moment or add a little more sparkle to your season. Shop holiday in-store or at Ulta.com. Ulta Beauty.