Heinz Brücher was a botanist and plant breeder who served as a member of the special science unit in the SS Ahnenerbe in Nazi Germany. He was part of a SS Sammelkommando that raided the plant genome material and seed collections of the Soviet Union. After the Second World War, Brücher moved to South America and worked as a professor of botany in Argentina and other countries in South America. He served as an advisor to UNESCO on biology.

Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov was a Russian and Soviet agronomist, botanist and geneticist who identified the centers of origin of cultivated plants. He devoted his life to the study and improvement of wheat, maize and other cereal crops that sustain the global population.