Nikolai Vavilov
By 1940, Vavilov had accumulated a collection of 200,000 plant seeds from the Soviet Union and from abroad. He was widely admired, but his life came to a terrible end. Vavilov repeatedly criticised a powerful but poor scientist, Trofim Lysenko. As a result, Vavilov was arrested, and died of starvation in a prison in 1943. Today Vavilov's name stands high. The Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry in St. Petersburg is named after him. It maintains one of the world's largest collections of plant genetic material.