Thirteen botanists starved to death surrounded by food.
During the siege of Leningrad, the scientists guarding the Vavilov Institute’s seed bank, the largest collection of seeds and tubers in the world, chose to protect the samples rather than eat them. Abraham Kameraz, Olga Voskresenskaia and eleven colleagues kept watch over the potato and grain collections at the Pavlovsk station, because those seeds were the future of food after the war.
They died of hunger next to shelves full of edible collections.
The bank survived.