Things I have learned doing what is definitely not the work I'm supposed to be doing:
Our domestic onion (Allium cepa L.) originated in the rocky, dry mountains of northern Iran. We know this because there are still wild relatives of our cepa onion growing there. These cousins are separate species from A. cepa, but are similar enough that they can be crossed with our onion.
These wild onions are Allium vavilovii (PopovΒ &Β Vved.) (first cousin) and Allium asarense (R.M.FritschΒ &Β Matin) (second cousin). Here's a free paper about them!
They look like our onions... kinda. They both share a life stage where they turn into big sticks with a bulb right in the center.
Part of what I love is the name. A. vavilovii literally translates to "Vavilov's onion". If you don't know Nikolai Vavilov (1887-1943), consider this your introduction! Vavilov was a legendary Russian and Soviet agronomist, botanist and geneticist. He travelled the globe, hunting down these wild relatives of our food crops, partially to build stronger crops, partially to understand the history of domestication and the movement of people. Please lose yourself in one of the coolest, mindblowingest wikipedia pages out there, describing the history and places of domestication largely built by him.
Horrifically, while we now know that Vavilov was a genius, things... didn't go great with Stalin. Stalin's personal favorite agronomist Trofim Lysenko was a monster and a master of jingoistic pseudoscience. Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics (the science we use now), focusing instead on Lamarkism (absolutely false horseshit). Lysenko had Vavilov sacked, grabbed by the Soviet secret police, interrogated for 11 months, and died in prison, likely due to starvation and pneumonia. You can decide if that was a better fate than his geneticist peers, who were just outright shot.
Lysenko would go on to set agricultural policy that would result in multiple famines that killed approximately 25-75 million people in USSR and Mao's China.
As we enter a growing era of anti-science, it's valuable to revisit the story of Vavilov. It's a horrifying reminder of the stakes of pseudoscience and what happens when ideology, rather than data, determines what is true.
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