Schriften zu Genetischen Ressourcen - Genres

History of Plant Genetic Resources and Personal Relationships with N.I. Vavilov and Sir Otto Frankel
seat in the Opera House. As it was sung in Georgian, with a Russian verbal interpretation
at the beginning of each act, I did not understand much of it! Nevertheless,
the boundless energy and enormous friendliness of Vavilov, had made a great impression
on me, as it did on every scientist he met.
At that time in 1938 Vavilov still received complete financial support for his Institute,
due to the importance of his research and that of his colleagues. When I learned in
later years of Vavilov’s imprisonment and death in 1943, it affected me with great
melancholy that such a person was not esteemed by the Soviet Government and
was put to death on trumped up charges. On the other hand, I was proud to have met
him and to have learned a great deal from his knowledge and his enthusiastic personality.
Sir Otto Frankel (1900-1998)
Sir Otto Frankel had a completely different personality from that of N.I. Vavilov. Nevertheless,
they converged in their complete devotion to their work, and especially to
the value of collecting and evaluating the genetic diversity of crop plants. They were
also clearly devoted to the conservation and use of this diversity, in the task of
breeding new and better adapted crop varieties, and the conservation of such diversity
for present and future needs.
Frankel had been brought up in Vienna, but had made a name for himself as Director
of Agricultural Research in New Zealand and later in Australia. He was nominated as
an adviser to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) and
he realised the threat to crop genetic diversity due to its replacement by new varieties.
This was a time, over 20 years after Vavilov, when these new high-yielding and
uniform varieties of crops were being introduced and cultivated at the expense of the
old crop diversity in many parts of the world.
Frankel had a strong and somewhat fierce personality, but this was necessary in
forcing the conservation of crop genetic diversity to be considered by research stations
and governments as an extremely important aspect of plant breeding for the
present and the future (see FRANKEL and BENNETT 1970; HAWKES 1978).
Frankel, together with the FAO representative, Erna Bennett, and I myself, met every
year at the FAO headquarters in Rome. We discussed and argued out the ways in
which this genetic diversity of ancient or traditional varieties might be conserved for
the use of crop plant breeders then and into the future.
We coined the term “Genetic Resources” for this wealth of genetic diversity, to emphasise
the importance of these old and very diverse crops which were being re-
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