Apples

Apple forests and aphids

April 30, 2009

Vavilov would, I hope, have been happy to learn that the wild apple forests of Kazahkstan have helped to answer an outstanding scientific mystery. Why do the leaves of some trees turn red in autumn? As I wrote elsewhere: Yellow leaves are easy to explain; the breakdown of chlorophyll exposes yellow carotenoids that were there [...]

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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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