#75: WW2's Secret Story: The Scientists Who Starved for the Future - Simon Parkin

During the 900-day Siege of Leningrad, scientists guarded a collection of 250,000 seeds as their city starved, and some chose to die rather than eat them. Award-winning journalist and author Simon Parkin reveals the full untold story.

Simon Parkin is a contributing writer for The New Yorker and The Observer, and author of The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad, named a Best Book of the Year by Scientific American and The Economist, and an NYT Editors' Choice.

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00:00 The Extraordinary Story of the Seed Bank

04:36 The Siege of Leningrad: A Historical Overview

08:50 Nikolai Vavilov: The Visionary Behind the Seed Bank

13:45 The Moral Dilemma: Seeds vs. Survival

18:20 The Botanists' Struggle: Protecting the Collection

22:37 Legacy of the Seed Bank: A Testament to Sacrifice

27:49 Survivor Accounts and Historical Challenges

29:04 The Seed Bank's Role During the Siege

30:41 The Importance of Preserving Seeds

31:29 Finding Obscure Stories in History

34:13 Internment of Enemy Aliens in Britain

35:59 Conditions in Internment Camps

39:53 Nuances of British History During WWII

41:39 Famous Figures in Internment Camps

42:32 Upcoming Projects and Future Stories

44:24 Philosophical Reflections on Life and Death

VALUE BULLETS

–The Siege of Leningrad lasted 900 days, why more people died there than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined

–How ordinary people survived starvation: swapping pianos for bread, burning furniture for warmth, and worse

–The impossible moral dilemma: should the scientists feed the seeds to the starving, or protect them for future generations?

–The man who built the world's first seed bank, and was arrested by Stalin and ironically died of starvation in the Gulag

–Why a scientist died at his desk with a packet of almonds in his hands that he refused to eat

–How 90% of the seeds preserved in the siege exist nowhere else on Earth. and why that still matters today

–Britain's shameful secret: how Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany were interned in British camps in 1940

–Simon's next book: Trial of the Space Invaders, the true story of the court case that tried to determine who invented video games

Simons Work:

📖 The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad (Simon & Schuster):

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Forbidden-Garden/Simon-Parkin/9781668007662

📖 The Island of Extraordinary Captives (Simon & Schuster):

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Island-of-Extraordinary-Captives/Simon-Parkin/9781982178529

🌐 Simon Parkin's website: https://www.simonparkin.com

🎙️ My Perfect Console Podcast (Spotify):

https://open.spotify.com/show/6PzHHkwpOs8YFgzqoKRXAi