During the Nazi siege of Leningrad, a group of scientists at the world's oldest seed bank voluntarily starved to death rather than eat the wheat, potatoes, nuts and other seeds being stored at Leningrad's Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry. At the same time, courtesy of Stalin, the institute's founding visionary Nikolay Vavilov was starving to death in a Siberian prison -- but not before he'd gathered more than 50,000 samples from 40 different countries for his institute's collection.
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