Which Russian botanist's seed bank staff starved to death rather than eat the collection?

Vavilov's. During the 900-day siege of Leningrad, staff at the world's first seed bank guarded a collection of hundreds of thousands of samples - rice, wheat, peas, potatoes - in a city where people were eating wallpaper paste. At least nine of them died of starvation surrounded by edible seed.

Vavilov himself was not there. He had built the collection over two decades of expeditions across five continents, and formulated the idea that crops have centres of origin where their wild diversity is concentrated - which is why those regions matter so much for breeding disease resistance into modern varieties. It is one of the foundational ideas of agricultural genetics.

He was arrested in 1940. Lysenko, who rejected genetics as bourgeois pseudoscience and promised the Party better harvests without it, had risen to run Soviet biology, and Vavilov's insistence on Mendel made him an enemy. He was sentenced to death, commuted to twenty years, and died of starvation in a Saratov prison in 1943 - the world's leading expert on feeding people, starved by his own state, while his staff starved protecting his seeds.