February 4, 2003	Tuesday	Zul Hijjah 2,1423

MOSCOW: One of the world’s greatest genetic resources, which survived the Second World War siege of Leningrad in which many of its scientists died, is to be thrown out of its home and risk destruction in order to make room for the luxurious tastes of President Vladimir Putin and his administration.

The Nikolai Vavilov Institute of Plant Growing and Research, situated on St Isaac’s Square in St Petersburg, one of Russia’s most historic squares, is one of four buildings that Moscow has ordered to be vacated to make room for government offices and accommodation and a possible presidential flat.

The institute, where priceless samples of plants and seeds have been collected since 1922, is valued by the World Bank at an incredible eight trillion dollars. It was founded by Nikolai Vavilov, a distinguished botanist and geneticist, whose team made 110 expeditions around the world collecting samples of 330,000 plants.

A quarter of the institute’s samples are now thought to be extinct, and modern conservation laws prevent similar samples being taken from the wild again, making it a priceless resource.

But Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov signed a decree on Dec 17 declaring that the institute must vacate the building, along with three of its neighbours on St Isaac’s Square.

“This is a catastrophe,” said Viktor Dragavtsev, director of the institute. “A transfer from here would mean the destruction of the institute.” He said that after a personal visit to the institute in 1993, former US Vice-President Al Gore had sent 92 US military refrigerators from army bases in Scotland and Sicily, which had been specially adapted to the building to keep its samples below minus 10 degrees Celsius.

During transfer, the seeds’ temperature will rise and they will lose their ability to reproduce. “Building a new DNA bank for the institute’s collection would cost at least US dollars 30 million,” he said.

Dragavtsev has written to Putin to ask him to stop the transfer. Yuri Vavilov, the son of Nikolai, the institute’s ‘s founder, said: “This is terrible news. If the institute loses its building, the collection which my father began to gather would vanish. This would be a real tragedy for science and an insult to the memory of my father.”

Critics have leapt upon the assigning of the buildings to the Presidential Logistics Department as a sign that the prestigious square will be another jewel in the increasingly weighty crown of the Putin administration. St Petersburg is Putin’s hometown, and speculation that one of the buildings will be used as a presidential city flat has grown. The main presidential residence, the Konstantinovsky Palace, restored at a cost of pounds sterling 120 million, is too far from the city centre to be a useful working residence, some argue.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.