「经济学人」The Forbidden Garden

A remarkable tale of sacrifice in the name of science

The Forbidden Garden. By Simon Parkin. Scribner; 384 pages; $30. Published in Britain as “The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad”; Sceptre; £25

For nearly 900 days in 1941-44, Nazi forces blockaded Leningrad, modern-day St Petersburg, trying to starve the city into submission. When food ran out, people ate cotton husks, leather belts and even their pets. Reports of cannibalism spread. Nearly a third of the population—some 750,000 civilians—died.

Yet in the centre of the city, in a former palace, the All Union Institute of Plant Breeding, the world’s first seed bank, housed 250,000 plants from five continents. This collection, if planted, could have fed “every citizen within Leningrad, and the Soviet Union and elsewhere besides”, writes Simon Parkin, a British journalist. Botanists faced a dilemma: safeguard the seed bank for the future or use it to save themselves and others from starvation?

“The Forbidden Garden” is the story of the seed bank’s staff, who chose not to eat the collection. As botanists, they grasped the potential of the seeds to engineer high-yielding and disease-resistant crops to feed future generations. Their abstention was not without consequences: 19 staff starved to death.

Whereas today huge gene banks, such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, store copies of the world’s crops in case of catastrophe, such initiatives used to seem eccentric. The plant library was the brainchild of Nikolai Vavilov, a renowned botanist (pictured). His international fame and network of luminaries drew the attention of Soviet authorities, who arrested him in 1940 and accused him of treason and, perversely, plotting to harm agriculture. Vavilov died in the gulag in 1943.

The Soviets did not value Vavilov’s work, but the Nazis did. They thought his collection could be used to create German supercrops. In a twist, Heinz Brücher, a botanist and senior SS officer, launched a covert mission to seize Vavilov’s seeds. Mr Parkin describes how the Nazis looted remote seed-breeding stations and established a rival seed bank in an Austrian castle. After the war Brücher fled, and the seeds he had stolen were lost.

But efforts to protect Vavilov’s collection were not in vain: over the past 70 years seeds saved during the siege have been used to create varieties of wheat that are superior in quality and yield. The sacrifice of the Russian botanists has stocked the world’s breadbasket.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Seeds of change”(Dec 5th 2024)

我没有译文，仅供拓展阅读

LearnAndRecord

2015年2月8日

2024年12月9日

第3593天

每天持续行动学外语