Talk:Nikolai Vavilov

Talk

Discussion for: Nikolai Vavilov • View • Links • Related changes

Use this page for verification notes, disputes, and action items. Keep narrative content on the article.

Page scope

Nikolai Vavilov is a biography of the botanist and geneticist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (1887–1943), written for his Afghan and Central Asian expeditions, the three cannabis names he published and the herbarium sheets grown from his seed. Accession pages store him as N.I. Vavilov; that title redirects here. The first specimen table queries both forms. The second lists accessions filed under his names (var. spontanea, var. kafiristanica, var. afghanica), whoever collected them.

Data verification

Life, career, expeditions and the arrest follow Loskutov, Vavilov and his Institute (IPGRI, 1999), read in full. The cannabis names, types and WIR sheets follow McPartland and Small (2020) with its Supplementary material 1, and Small and Cronquist (1976). Vavilov's own Russian works (1922, 1926; Vavilov and Bukinich 1929) were not read here: what the article says of them comes from those three sources. Discuss conflicts and corrections here.

Discussion

Date of death

Loskutov (1999) gives January 1943 in the text, from eyewitnesses interviewed by Mark Popovsky, and reproduces a document captioned "The act of 24 January 1943 certifying N.I. Vavilov's death". English Wikipedia gives 26 January 1943; the source for that day was not read. The article gives the month only. S. C. Harland's obituary in Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 9 (1954) is titled "Nicolai Ivanovitch Vavilov, 1885 - 1942", against the 1887 birth year in Loskutov and the International Plant Names Index.

Unconsulted biographies

James F. Crow, "N. I. Vavilov, martyr to genetic truth", Genetics 134 (1993): 1–4, and Ilya Zakharov, "Nikolai I. Vavilov (1887–1943)", Journal of Biosciences 30 (2005): 299–301, were not read. Both are likely sources for the exact date of death and his years as director. Mark Popovsky's book on the case (Delo akademika Vavilova, 1990; English edition The Vavilov Affair, 1984) is known here only through Loskutov's quotations.

The 1922 publication

Small and Cronquist (1976) cite var. spontanea from Trudy po Prikladnoi Botanike i Selektsii 13 (suppl. 23): 148; McPartland and Small (2020) give pages 147–148 and the title Polevye kul'tury Yugo-Vostoka ("Field crops of the South-East"), as does Loskutov's bibliography. This is a different work from "The law of homologous series in variation", published in English in the Journal of Genetics in the same year.

Page of f. afghanica

McPartland and Small (2020) cite the basionym as Trudy 16(2): 227 (1926), but list Vavilov's 1926 hemp paper in their references as 16(2): 107–121. The 1926 volume was not read, so the article gives no page.

Rank of the 1929 names

Vavilov and Bukinich were not consistent: the figure caption on page 380 has C. indica f. kafiristanica, the formal description on page 381 var. kafiristanica; afghanica appears as a variety (p. 380), a form (p. 381) and a form of var. kafiristanica (p. 382). Small and Cronquist (1976) read the caption's ranks as reversed. The article uses var. kafiristanica, the rank Small and Cronquist adopted for their combination.

Number of seed sites

McPartland and Small say Vavilov sent Serebriakova seed from four places, the four rows of their Table S8. Their specimen lists name WIR sheets grown from his 1924 seed from more places than that: Gui-Akhen, Fayzabad, Marwa, Sheberghan, Chekhosarai, Barkandai and Kafiristan. The article gives no number.

Kafiristan and Kunar

The lectotype of var. kafiristanica came from Chekhosarai (now Asadabad), which is in Kunar Province, not in Kafiristan (now Nuristan). McPartland and Small (2020) point this out. Seven WIR sheets are labelled C. sativa var. spontanea and annotated "like ruderal"; four come from Chekhosarai and two from Kafiristan, all immature and without seed.

Sheets without accession pages

WIR 3952 (Chekhosarai, epitype of var. asperrima, GBIF 3115516395), the second Gui-Akhen sheet (WIR 609, 7380), the Fayzabad, Marwa and Sheberghan sheets, the Kafiristan sheet WIR 607, 4034, Lebedev's Radam Obe sheet at LE and Vavilov 5667 at LE, cited by Small and Cronquist, have no accession pages. Vavilov 5667 has no GBIF record.

Portrait

Wikimedia Commons holds a photograph from the New York World-Telegram and Sun collection (File:Nikolai Vavilov NYWTS.jpg). Its licence was not checked. The lead image is the neotype sheet grown from his seed.