Nature Nurture Cultivation. Biological & Biomedical Sciences

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Contributions of Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, Luther Burbank and Norman Borlaug in Plant Breeding
Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, Luther Burbank, and Norman Borlaug are outstanding agricultural scientists' who used the biology of phenotypes to explore the nature of genetics of genotypes. Though they came from different countries and States, their discoveries have enabled us to understand the origin of crops and how civilizations nurture themselves while cultivating plants.
Vavilov was born in Moscow, Russia, to a wealthy merchant in 1887. From an early age, he had an obsession with ending famine in Russia, his native country, and the world. The fascination he had of food security pushed him to study agriculture at the Moscow Institute of Agriculture. It was during his studying that he came to know about Gregor Mendel (the father of modern genetics), a plant geneticist who profoundly influenced Vavilov's interests in plant breeding. He specifically carried out studies regarding disease resistance problems on oats, wheat, and barley. After the civil war, Vavilov traveled the world from the United States to the Middle East, Afghanistan, North Africa, and Ethiopia, collecting seeds of wild crops for cultivation as well as valuable samples of bread-wheat and rye (Janick 774). Vavilov’s seed collection grew to almost sixty thousand acquisitions that he deposited in the Leningrad Seed bank. His vision was to cultivate new strains of crops to end hunger worldwide.
Apart from Vavilov, Luther Burbank encouraged the development of plant breeding into modern science. Born in 1849 in Lancaster, Massachusetts, U.S., Luther Burbank was an American Botanist and horticulturist as well as a pioneer of agricultural science. One of his goals was to increase food supply in the world by manipulating the characteristics of plants. He indicates that his inspiration came from Charles Darwin’s Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. Through Darwin’s determination, Burbank could develop better plants through natural selection and new varieties by crossbreeding or hybridization. His focus...