That morning Lekhnovich had awoken to find his boss Vavilov seated at a writing desk by the door, scribbling notes for the day ahead. A polyglot who read the eighteenth-century botanist Carl Linnaeus in the original Latin, Vavilov possessed seemingly inexhaustible energies. On expeditions he slept for only a few hours at night and routinely worked eighteen-hour days. He had, as one colleague wrote, “a mind that never slept and a body which for its capacity for enduring physical hardships can seldom have been matched.” “Life is short,” he often said. “One must hurry.” But Lekhnovich had detected a new sense of urgency to his leader’s demeanor on this trip, the agitation of a person worried that he might not have enough time to achieve his remaining ambitions.

In 1916 Vavilov mounted his first major expedition to northern Iran to study cereals.

Vavilov’s pride at the seed bank was braided through with the affection he felt for his colleagues, whom he referred to as the “kings and queens” of their various specialties.