Original subtitles

To be human has been to know the torment of hunger.

There was once a man who dreamed that through science,

we could make a world where no one would ever perish from hunger.

And famine would be no more.

He gave us a treasure to fulfil that promise,

but he faced a terrible choice at a moment of reckoning.

To lie about science and live,

or to tell the truth and face certain death.

For the first couple of hundred thousand years that

we were human, we were wanderers living beneath the stars.

We gathered plant life and hunted animals.

Until about ten or 12,000 years ago,

when our ancestors invented a new way to live.

Think of those geniuses who were the first to realize that

inside the plants they foraged,

was a means to make another plant.

A seed.

That discovery led to the single most fateful choice our species ever made.

They could continue to wander in small bands,

or they could settle down to grow and raise their food.

This required sacrifices for rewards that would not come until much later.

For the first time, we were thinking about the future.

Of course, these decisions weren't made in an instant.

They unfolded over generations.

That seems like a long time ago in human terms,

but in the great sweep of cosmic time,

it was less than a half a minute ago.

This Cosmic Calendar compresses all of the last 13.8 billion years

since the big bang into a single calendar Earth year.

Midnight on December 31 is right now.

Every month is a little more than a billion years.

Every day, a little less than 40 million years.

And all of humanity's proudest achievements unfold

in the last couple of minutes of cosmic time.

That's how new we are to the universe.

Our ancestors began to domesticate animals and

plants less than 30 seconds ago on the Cosmic Calendar.

For the first time, the wanderers were settling down.

And building things to last for more than a single season.

They dared to touch the future.

Their tower of Jericho still stands.

Was it a watchtower for protecting the city from invaders?

Or just a way to get closer to the stars?

It took 11,000 work days to build.

Something that could only be possible with the

food surpluses that agriculture provided.

This is the world's oldest stairway.

It was already 5,000 years old before the first Egyptian pyramid was built.

To climb it is to follow in the footsteps of 300 generations.

Isn't it astonishing that people who had barely ceased wandering,

we're able to create something of such permanence?

The rich and varied hunter-gatherer diet,

of plants, insects, birds and other animals, was replaced.

City dwellers largely subsisted on a few carbohydrate crops.

And when the rains didn't come or a fungus afflicted the grain,

there was hunger on a massive scale.

Famine.

Famines caused by drought and British colonial mismanagement

in India in the 18th century killed ten million people.

In China, during the famines of the 19th century,

more than 100 million people perished.

The great hunger in Ireland,

also a result of British imperial policy,

starved a million to death and

forced another two million to flee the country in search of a living.

The Brazilian drought and pestilence of 1877 was comparable.

In a single province, more than half died of starvation.

The dead remain uncounted from the famines that wracked

Ethiopia, Rwanda and the Sahel in Africa.

For a couple of thousand years,

ever since records were kept, somewhere on Earth,

people in great numbers have starved.

Could agriculture become a science with a predictive theory as reliable as gravity?

One that could consistently produce breeds able to stand up to drought and disease?

Farmers and herders knew the advantages of preferentially

selecting the hardiest specimens for crossbreeding,

to produce a more successful hybrid.

This was known as artificial selection.

But the mechanism of how those traits were passed on to

succeeding generations remained a complete mystery.

This is Down House.

Charles Darwin's home, where he lived with his wife

Emma and their ten children.

He was hardly the authoritarian Victorian patriarch.

But instead a tender, loving father who delighted

in his children's ridicule.

This is the garden he planted.

This place is a strangely pastoral setting for the most

influential revolutionary in the history of thought.

Even now, there are people who are afraid of his idea.

Charles Darwin discovered that species, including ours,

evolve over time through a process of natural selection.

The environment rewards those best adapted to its changing

realities with survival and with new generations of offspring.

Darwin demystified the external reality of life,

but no one had any idea what the inner mechanisms of evolution were.

At that same moment, an abbot at a rural monastery

in what is now the Czech Republic was trying to become a science professor.

Gregor Mendel flunked his qualifying exam both times.

The only career path open to him was to become a substitute teacher.

So in his spare time,

he took up the study of pea plants.

He bred tens of thousands of them,

carefully scrutinizing their height and their shape

and the color of their pods, their seeds and flowers.

Mendel was searching for a predictive theory of breeding.

So that you could know in advance exactly what you would

get when you crossed a tall plant with a short one,

and a green pea with a yellow one.

Mendel found that you would get a yellow pea every time.

We didn't have a word for the power of the yellow over

the green until Mendel coined it.

He called that quality "dominant."

And to his delight, he found that he could predict what would

happen in the next generation of peas after that.

One in four pea plants would be green.

Mendel named the hidden trait that popped up in the next crop, "recessive."

There was something he called "factors,"

hidden inside the plants that caused particular characteristics.

And they operated by a law that Mendel could describe

with a simple equation, like gravity.

Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel didn't know it,

but the two scientists were deciphering the mysterious

workings of life at the very same moment.

Darwin presented the evidence for a oneness with all life.

That despite our pretensions to a mystical higher birth,

we were actually relatives to the other beasts and vegetables.

As much a part of the natural world as any other living thing.

Mendel discovered that there were laws governing the

way life's messages were passed on.

The substitute teacher had invented a whole new field of science.

But nobody noticed for 35 years.

He died never knowing that the world would come to see him

as a giant in the history of science.

Mendel's work was resurrected at the beginning of

the 20th century and he had no more vigorous defender

than the British zoologist William Bateson.

It was Bateson who named the new field of science devoted

to studying these factors.

Genetics.

Bateson and his colleagues worked on developing

new breeds of plants and animals.

He believed that science and freedom were indivisible

and that's how he ran his laboratory.

Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov,

a visiting botanist from Russia,

took Bateson's credo deeply to heart.

He wanted to use the new field of genetics to learn

how to feed the world.

He was on his honeymoon but science was his passion.

Even as a child, Vavilov had a sense of urgency.

"Too little time, too much to do," was his lifelong refrain.

How could he have known what was coming?

The idea that our planet is a single organism,

a unity, has a ring of hollow sentimentality for many people.

But it's just a scientific fact.

Something is about to happen here, in remote Southern Peru,

in the year 1600 on February 19 at 5:00 PM.

Unsuspecting multitudes and distant foreign capitals

will never know how this event reached around the world

to torment and kill them.

This nasty mixture of sulfuric acid and volcanic ash

will block the sun's rays from reaching Earth.

Some of the sunlight will be absorbed here in the stratosphere.

The eruption of Huaynaputina volcano remains to this day

the largest explosion in South America in recorded history.

Winter is coming.

Volcanic winter.

For the people of Russia,

it brought the worst winter in six centuries.

For two years, even the summer temperatures would fall

below freezing at night.

Two million people, a third of Russia's population,

would die from the resulting famine.

It led to the downfall of the Tsar Boris Godunov and

all because of a volcano that erupted 8,000 miles away in Peru.

This was not the last famine in Russian history.

Drought and famines occur frequently.

But it wasn't until nearly three centuries later,

in 1891, that the magnitude of suffering was again as ghastly.

Winter came early that year and the crops failed.

Tsar Alexander III was slow to respond.

Wealthy Russian merchants continued to export grain at

a profit even as millions went hungry.

All the Tsar had to offer his starving subjects was "famine bread."

A miserable mixture of moss, weeds, bark and husks.

Half a million Russians perished,

while the aristocracy and the wealthy feasted on fresh

strawberries from the south of France and clotted cream from England.

The Russian Revolution would not explode for another 30 years,

but many historians believe that this famine

was the spark that ignited the long fuse.

It was to make a lasting impression on the hero of

our story, Nikolai Vavilov.

This is the Vavilov family.

The parents were born into poverty but had worked their

way up into the upper middle class.

All four of the children would grow up to become scientists.

Sergey became a physicist.

Nikolai grew up to be a botanist.

Don't come near me.

If you touch me, I'll jump.

Even as a boy, Vavilov was never one to back down.

In 1911, Russia was the largest grain exporter on Earth,

despite the fact that its farming methods were antiquated.

The Petrovsky Institute was the only place in Russia where

scientists could hope to modernize food production

through the new science of genetics.

But it was still a matter of controversy.

Debate topic for today,

is plant selection a science or not?

It is not a science.

A farmer knows best.

He's been sowing the larger seeds and crossbreeding

the fattest animals for thousands of years.

What do we scientists have to offer them?

Except fancy equations to confuse the peasants.

They don't want that. They want bread.

The farmer has wisdom and is worthy of our respect.

But tragically, he lacks the predictive powers of science.

They cannot foretell which traits will dominate

or which will be recessive.

The farmer plays roulette and he's about as successful

as the average gambler.

Gregor Mendel made it possible for him to know the odds.

To know what number the ball will land on.

The moment Mendel expressed his ideas mathematically,

agriculture became a science and our only hope

to efficiently feed ourselves.

And feed the world.

In 1914, during the First World War,

Vavilov began to wonder.

Where did the domesticated plants come from?

Who were their ancestors?

In a love letter he wrote...

I really believe deeply in science.

It is my life and the purpose of my life.

I do not hesitate to give my life even for the smallest bit of science.

The First World War revealed the deep cracks in

Russian society and spurred the outbreak of revolution and civil war.

Vavilov established the first of his 400 scientific

institutes where the children of peasants and

laborers became scientists.

All in the service of Vavilov's dream of ending famine.

In 1920, Vavilov dared to propose a new law of nature.

Comrades, the same genes perform the

same functions in different species of plants.

This is because they share a common ancestor.

In order to understand evolution and to guide our

breeding work scientifically, we must go to the oldest

agricultural countries where these common ancestors may still live.

Russia shall not perish as long as there are

people like Nikolai Vavilov!

Vavilov was now world famous.

Me, I'm nothing special.

It's my brother Sergey, the physicist,

who's the brilliant one.

Vavilov knew that every seedling contains its species' unique message.

The content's different,

but they were all written in a mysterious language.

One that would not be deciphered for decades.

Vavilov wanted to preserve every phrase of life's ancient scripture,

to ensure its safe passage to the future.

He was among the first to grasp the critical importance of biodiversity.

Vavilov came up with an entirely new concept.

A world seed bank that he hoped would be impervious

to war and natural catastrophe.

And there was a scientific underpinning to this humanitarian goal.

If you could find the earliest living specimens of the plants we eat,

you could parse its sentences and decipher life's language.

You could know how it changed over time.

This decryption would make it possible to write new messages.

To grow food immune to disease,

fungus and insects and resistant to drought.

Vavilov would become a hunter of plants on five continents,

venturing to places no scientist dared go before him.

Without maps or roads, Vavilov was the first European

in modern times to venture into the mountainous regions of Afghanistan.

Riddled with tribal clashes and other dangers,

Vavilov was suspicious of the prevalent hypothesis that

humans invented agriculture in the river deltas.

He reasoned that remote mountain strongholds would

be a much safer place to farm.

Far from the casual plundering of passersby.

As Vavilov risked life and limb,

searching for seeds on five continents,

his legend as a daredevil equalled his reputation for scientific genius.

In 1927, in what was then Abyssinia, now Ethiopia,

Vavilov discovered the mother of all coffee.

It was a good thing too.

Because he needed to stay awake all night guarding the camp.

As Vavilov waited for permission to travel into the interior,

he was surprised to receive an invitation from

the regent and future emperor of Ethiopia, Rastafari.

Or as the world would come to know him, Haile Selassie.

Vavilov later recalled...

It was just the two of us.

He questioned me with great interest about my country

and its revolution.

I informed him that Lenin, our founder, had died,

and Joseph Stalin now ruled.

I told Rastafari how Stalin's armed robbery of a bank had

raised $3 million for the revolution and made him

a folk hero in Russia 20 years before.

As Vavilov continued his global quest for seeds and knowledge,

Trofim Lysenko, one of Vavilov's numerous

protégé's was beginning to make a name for himself.

Fresh green peas in the wintertime?

Sound too good to be true?

Not if barefoot plant expert Trofim Lysenko has anything to say about it.

No universities or staring at the hairy legs of flies in laboratories for him.

No lavish trips to foreign lands in pursuit of ancient asparagus.

He does it the peasant way in the fields of Mother Russia.

And there'll be green peas on the table this January thanks to him.

As Joseph Stalin was having all his political

rivals systematically murdered,

he began to slash away at the structure of Russian agriculture.

His stated goal was to modernize Soviet agriculture.

But the result was catastrophic.

Stalin ordered the Kulaks,

as the more prosperous peasants were known,

to be liquidated as a class.

Between five and ten million people perished of famine.

But to Trofim Lysenko, this massive tragedy was an opportunity.

Lysenko hated Vavilov for his knowledge and fame,

and like the snake that he was;

he knew exactly when to strike.

And ultimately, his venom would be fatal.

The Garden of Eden must have been somewhere near

here in central Asia because this is where the first apples grow.

Vavilov traveled the world identifying the first

places on Earth to bear these seeds.

Collecting samples of each for safekeeping.

All in all, Vavilov brought back a quarter of a million varieties of seeds.

The Russia Vavilov returned to was a different country.

One in the grip of the most vicious famine it had ever known.

The heady optimism of the revolution had been replaced with dread and despair.

Vavilov's institute of plant industry,

in the city that was then called Leningrad,

was now the largest collection of genetic information on Earth.

His team began to sort and catalogue every precious seed.

They worked tirelessly,

as if the life of every hungry Russian depended on them.

Comrade Stalin.

I have something of vital importance to our nation's security to tell you.

I know why the country starves and I know how to turn famine

into plenty so that you may triumph over all those who

seek to undermine you.

Well then, Comrade Lysenko,

you must be a very powerful man.

The scientists are lying to you.

Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, Nikolai Vavilov, all liars.

Comrade, why do you think the giraffe has a long neck?

A giraffe?

Why are you wasting my time?

So it can nibble on leaves at the top of the trees?

Exactly.

But the scientists say no.

They believe in imaginary, invisible entities called

genes that somehow get changed by equally invisible forces

that tell the giraffe to have a long neck

and a chicken to have a short one.

I don't believe in imaginary things.

But Vavilov does and that's why our people starve.

While he's been off collecting souvenirs,

I've been devising a way to give Mother Russia the thing she needs most.

A harvest of wheat in the dead of winter.

If this is true, if you really have this power...

I do, Comrade. I do.

But I must have a free hand.

No more interference from the bourgeois geneticists.

They are agents of our enemies.

They want to starve Russia into submission.

That's not why the giraffe's neck is long.

How could Stalin have fallen for that one?

It was easy.

He desperately wanted to believe it.

Lysenko was peddling the long discredited theory of an early

19th century naturalist named Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

He believed that acquired characteristics,

let's say the length of a giraffe's neck from straining

to get at those leaves up high,

could be inherited by the next generation.

He failed to grasp that it took millions of years of

evolution and higher survival rates among the generations of

giraffes with even slightly longer necks to result

in a tall modern giraffe.

This increasingly long neck of the giraffe was due to random

mutations in the genes that happened to lead to a more successful giraffe.

Not their neck stretching exertions.

This had been Charles Darwin's revolutionary insight.

Evolution by natural selection.

Lysenko whispered in Stalin's ear that he could fulfill

a centuries old Russian dream and end the famine that

threatened Stalin's grip on the country.

Lysenko would soak the wheat seeds in ice water

so that they could still thrive in the ice and snow.

A process he called vernalization.

Lysenko falsely claimed that the plants offspring

would inherit the resistance to cold.

No time-consuming painstaking crossbreeding required.

Only one thing stood in his way.

Vavilov and his stubborn adherence to genetics.

The bitter irony was that while Lysenko was spinning

fantasies of abundance for Stalin,

Vavilov and his team were crossing wheat species from

higher altitudes that actually would've resulted

in heightened food production in Russia.

As Vavilov rushed to the Kremlin,

all he could think about was the work that needed to be done.

He was on a collision course that would doom him

and countless others to starvation.

Vavilov knew that no man could witness

Stalin's fear and expect to live long.

Nikolai Ivanovich, I tell you, we are in

the gravest danger.

Three days ago, the secret police came for Yevgeny and Leonid.

They haven't been heard from since.

Their wives are frantic.

Lysenko takes every opportunity to blame you

for the famine.

I tell you, we must stop the experiments in genetics.

Carry on quietly with your work.

No matter what happens.

We must hurry.

We must be like Michael Faraday,

working hard and keeping accurate notes of the results.

If I disappear, then you must take my place.

The only thing that matters is getting the science right.

It is the only hope of ending this famine

and all the others to come.

Comrade, they're going to arrest you and all of us.

Then we better work that much faster.

Stalin's forced collectivization of farms

in the Ukraine led to one of the darkest chapters in human history.

It was a famine so severe and widespread that instead of

being known by a year and a place,

it was given a name all its own.

Holodomor, meaning the extermination by hunger.

Stalin's zeal to push the kulak peasants off their farms

and into factories had become a policy of genocide.

Vavilov and his geneticists continue to speak against you.

I cannot bear it.

Stalin knew that getting rid of Vavilov might be trouble.

The global scientific community admired Vavilov for

his ideas and his courage.

They had even been willing to move their international

genetics congress to Moscow when Stalin wouldn't let him travel outside the country.

Discredit Vavilov first,

then you can do with him as you wish.

I regret to report that the biochemists

are not yet able to distinguish the lentil from the pea by

analyzing their proteins.

I reckon that anyone who tries them on their tongue

can tell a lentil from a pea.

Comrade, we are unable to distinguish them chemically.

What's the point of being able to distinguish them

chemically if you can try them on your tongue?

Lysenko now mounted a relentless campaign against

Vavilov and science.

It came to a head at a two-day conference.

All the scientists and enemies of science gathered to

debate the future of Soviet agricultural policy.

And so we shall soon see how my method of soaking

seeds of all kinds in ice water shall lead to a better fed Motherland.

What? No experiments? No data?

Perhaps you haven't noticed.

Your ranks are thinning.

Vernalization is going to provide a huge winter harvest.

You are either with our plan or...

You can take me to the stake.

You can set me on fire.

But you can't make me lie about science!

We've just witnessed a man committing suicide.

He's going to be arrested.

Arrested? For what?

You just wait.

That's the last you'll see of this poor brilliant fool.

But Vavilov was no fool.

In preparation for what was coming,

he had warned his colleagues that they must ask

for transfers to other institutes to save themselves.

His closest colleagues valiantly refused to distance

themselves from Vavilov.

Comrade Vavilov, you are needed back in Moscow.

It seems you took some papers that didn't belong to you.

Just let me use the last of the light to finish my work, please.

This looks bad, Comrade. Really bad.

You've been up to some serious mischief.

You must've known you would be found out soon or later.

What can you possibly be talking about?

Yes, yes.

I'm sure you're completely mystified.

Don't be cute with me.

You know why you are here.

You have been arrested as an active participant in

a subversive anti-Soviet organization and a spy for

foreign intelligence services.

Do you admit your guilt?

No. I do not.

I declare categorically that I have never engaged in

espionage or any other anti-Soviet activity.

The testimony you cite are of witnesses whom the state

has already murdered.

You know I am not a spy.

You know I love my country.

My real crime, my only crime is a profound difference

of scientific opinion.

Vavilov's tormentor had plenty of experience

softening up such stubborn subjects.

He started interrogating Vavilov for ten,

12 hours at a time.

Usually rousing him out of his bed in the middle of the night.

He must've been tortured,

because his legs were so swollen,

he was unable to walk.

Vavilov would be dragged back to his cell and crawl to

a place on the floor and just lie there, unable to move.

It kept on for 1,700 hours, more than 400 sessions.

Until Vavilov finally broke.

A year after his arrest, he was sentenced to be shot.

He was taken to the place of his execution where

he languished for months.

Just when things couldn't get any darker,

an even greater darkness descended.

Hitler had broken his nonaggression pact with

Stalin, sending millions of German troops and thousands

of tanks to invade Russia.

But the siege of Leningrad was, by any metric,

the most ghastly of all.

This was the world's genetic inheritance.

The seeds of the plants that had sustained us since

the invention of agriculture.

And Hitler, unlike Stalin, knew that it was priceless.

We don't even know if he's alive.

Until we do, we must find it within ourselves to

do as Nikolai Ivanovich would.

If the siege lasts, our fellow citizens will get very hungry.

This building contains several tons of edible material.

We must figure out how to protect every last seed

for the time when the world returns to its senses.

In all of history, no team of scientists has ever been tested so cruelly.

They were pushed beyond the breaking point and yet they did not break.

On Christmas Day alone in 1941,

4,000 people starved to death in Leningrad.

The city had been under siege by Hitler's army for more than 100 days.

The temperature was -40 degrees and the city's entire infrastructure had collapsed.

It was only a matter of time, Hitler thought to himself,

before Leningrad succumbed to his will.

No city could endure such suffering for very long.

While Stalin fretted over the safety of the

artworks at the Hermitage Museum,

he never gave a single thought to Vavilov's seed bank.

But Hitler had already taken the Louvre art museum of Paris.

He coveted something much more precious.

Vavilov's treasure.

Hitler had established a special tactical unit of the SS,

Russland-Sammelcommando, the Russian collector commandos,

to take control of the seed bank and retrieve

its living riches for future use by the Third Reich.

They waited at the ready, like a pack of Dobermans,

straining to be unleashed on the institute.

The botanists were now down to a ration of two slices

of bread per day.

But still, they continued their work.

In a way, the German army was the least of their worries.

If only Vavilov were here.

I feel so lost without him.

Dear comrade, as painful as it is,

we must accept that he's gone forever.

But Vavilov was alive... barely.

He had been moved to another prison in another city.

I am 54 years old, with a vast experience and

knowledge in the field of plant breeding.

I would be happy to devote myself entirely to

the service of my country.

I request and beg you to allow me to work in my special field,

even at the lowest level.

But no answer ever came.

The state had decided not to shoot him.

They had a crueler fate in mind for the man who did

more than any other to eliminate famine and hunger,

he would be deliberately and slowly starved to death.

800,000 other human beings had starved to death in Leningrad.

Besieged by the German forced from September of 1941 until

January of 1944, the city somehow still managed

to hold out against the relentless assault.

The meager rations of two slices of bread a day had

run out long before, and the protectors of Vavilov's

treasure began to succumb to hunger amidst the plenty that

their sacred honor prevented them from consuming.

Botanist Alexander Stchukin, specialist in groundnuts.

Liliya Rodina, expert on oats.

Dimitry Ivanov, world authority on rice.

The botanists perished from hunger,

and yet not a grain of rice in the collection was unaccounted for.

And what of Vavilov's nemesis, Trofim Lysenko?

He maintained his death grip on Soviet agriculture

and biology for another two decades,

until three of Russia's most distinguished scientists

publicly denounced him for his pseudoscience and his other crimes.

And what of Vavilov's brother, Sergey, the physicist?

Stalin made him chairman of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

After Stalin's death and the recognition of the damage

he and Lysenko had done to the Soviet Union,

Nikolai Vavilov could once again be talked about in public.

The Institute of Plant Industry was renamed after him,

and it still thrives.

And this is here because of his life and work.

This Svalbard Global Seed Vault is buried deep beneath

the Earth at the top of the world.

It can hold four and a half million kinds of seeds underground.

So why didn't the botanists at the Institute eat a single grain of rice?

Why didn't they distribute the seeds and nuts and potatoes

to the people of Leningrad who were dying of starvation

every day for more than two years?

Did you eat today?

If the answer is yes, then you probably ate something that

descended from the seeds that the botanists died to protect.

They gave their lives for us.

If only our future was as real and precious to us as it was to them.

Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.