Gary Paul Nabhan

Dates from Siwa oasis

February 1, 2010

The oasis of Siwa … leaves a strange impression, but perhaps one that is different and more paradoxical than that which Vavilov sensed in oases further west. There is at once a sense of uninterrupted continuity with the Berber oases of antiquity, with the mud walls of the Shali village compound rising high above thousands [...]

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Gary Nabhan visits the oasis of Siwa

January 29, 2010

Unlike Vavilov — who had to content himself with sending the Italian student Gudzoni — Gary Nabhan was able to visit Egypt himself. Drawing on previous expeditions by the plant explorer Robert Humphrey Forbes, Nabhan found that much was the same, and much had changed. This is the first of his posts on Siwa. Eighty [...]

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The relevance of Vavilov in 2010

January 20, 2010

Gary Nabhan was in Russia last week to receive the Vavilov Memorial Medal at the Vavilov Institute of General Genetics in Moscow. He is only the second foreign scientist to receive this honour. In addition to delivering a lecture on Origins, Dispersal and Conservation of Domesticated Plants and Animals in Moscow and, later, St Petersburg, [...]

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From breadbasket to basket case

May 29, 2009

It was dawning on Vavilov that he had arrived in Lebanon in the absolute worst of times. Over the previous two decades, these lands had suffered from wars, locust plagues, economic disruptions, and out-migrations that had reduced the pre-1900 population by more than 60 percent. But the worst problem facing the Arabian farmers and herders [...]

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Wheat in Lebanon

May 13, 2009

The cultivated variety that Vavilov described near the village of Hawran is still grown to some extent, as are a few varieties such as Salamouni, which is ideally suited for making bulgur, a cracked cereal used in tabbouleh. However, while the locally adapted varieties suited to bulgur and another traditional dish, kishk, have persisted in [...]

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I created twenty-seven new varieties from wild apples

April 20, 2009

Less than 30% of the original stands of apples in the forests of Kazakhstan remain. Instead of accepting such losses and assuming that protecting the forest remnants is enough, Aimak Dzangaliev has another future in mind for the apples of Kazakhstan. He has proposed forest restoration in the best remaining habitats, employing some twenty-seven clones [...]

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An abyss of genetic loss among apples

April 17, 2009

When Vavilov came back to Leningrad in November of 1929, he worked for another year and a half on a monograph entitled, The wild relatives of fruit trees of the Asian part of the USSR and Caucasus, and the problem of the origin of fruit trees. Three-quarters of a century later, Professor Dzangaliev, his wife [...]

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Like a Czar, or perhaps like a God

April 16, 2009

“Why, I asked myself, have our wild apple trees attracted the attention of such a genius?” Aimak Dzangaliev’s answer to his own question set him on a trajectory that dominated the next seven decades of his own life. If a world renowned scholar from St Petersburg risked his life to see the wild apples of [...]

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Vavilov plants a seed

April 14, 2009

I had always dreamed of meeting someone who had known Nikolay Ivanovich Vavilov; not merely someone who had shaken hands with him at a meeting, but perhaps a scientist or farm laborer who had worked with him in the field. This dream came true during a summer 2006 journey to Kazakhstan’s most famous city, Almaty. [...]

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The true Grandfather of the Apple

April 7, 2009

At the age of ninety-two, Aimak Dzangaliev is hardly larger than the smallest of Kazakhstan’s teenage boys. His countenance is much like that of a Mongolian elder who has spent decades on the wind-swept plains of Asia, gradually shriveling down by sun and wind to the size of a prune. But when Nikolay Vavilov and [...]

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