With +/- 1 Year To Live, Former Astronaut Chooses Front Lines Of Climate, Working In Greenland

[hatrack]

5. It reminds me of the Vavilov Institute in the USSR

The Institute was one of (if not the) premier botanical and scientific research assets of the Soviet Union and at the time, the largest repository of seeds, rootstocks, cultivars, fruit trees and grains in the world

It was in Leningrad, and was was besieged for more then three years. Something like 750,000 residents died of starvation, disease and bombing/artillery attacks.

The scientists at the Vavilov were responsible for the nation's seedbank - thousands of landraces and varieties of corn, wheat, barley, beans, rye and much more. They could have taken the grain stored on site and used it to feed themselves and their families, or sold it on the black market.

Instead, they held themselves to a higher responsibility - protecting their nation's most valuable stores of crop genetics. By the end of the siege, nine of the scientists who worked at Vavilov had starved to death.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov