The Seed Bank That Starved Men Refused to Eat

In September 1941, German forces encircled Leningrad and began a siege that would last 872 days. Inside the starving city, a small group of scientists at the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry faced an agonizing choice. They guarded the world's largest collection of seeds — rice, wheat, corn, thousands of varieties representing decades of careful gathering from every continent. Any one of them could have eaten the seeds and survived another week.…