Futility Closet

  During the siege of Leningrad in World War II, a heroic group of Russian botanists fought cold, hunger, and German attacks to keep alive a storehouse of crops that held the future of Soviet agriculture. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll tell the story of the Vavilov Institute, whose scientists literally starved to death protecting tons of treasured food. We'll also follow a wayward sailor and puzzle over how to improve the safety of tanks. Intro: Tippi Hedren, star of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, shared her home with a 400-pound lion. In 2009, a California consumer sued PepsiCo for implying that crunchberries are a fruit. Sources for our feature on Nikolai Vavilov: S.M. Alexanyan and V.I. Krivchenko, "Vavilov Institute Scientists Heroically Preserve World Plant Genetic Resources Collections During World War II Siege of Leningrad," Diversity 7:4 (1991), 10-13. James F. Crow, “N. I. Vavilov, Martyr to Genetic Truth,” Genetics 134:4 (May 1993). Olga Elina, Susanne Heim, and Nils Roll