Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov HFRSE
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(25 November [O.S.
13 November] 1887 – 26 January 1943) was a prominent Russian and Soviet agronomist, botanist and geneticist best known for having identified the centers of origin of cultivated plants.
He devoted his life to the study and improvement of wheat, corn, and other cereal crops that sustain the global population.
Vavilov's work was criticized by Trofim Lysenko, whose anti-Mendelian concepts of plant biology had won favor with Joseph Stalin.
As a result, Vavilov was arrested and subsequently sentenced to death in July 1941.
Although his sentence was commuted to twenty years' imprisonment, he died of starvation in prison in 1943.