The philosopher Pablo Huerga Melcón (University of Oviedo) presents the book Vavilov in Spain. An odyssey in search of spelled (Rema y Vive, 2023).

• Location: Matadero Uno Bookstore

• Date: July 19, 2024

• Time: 19:00

Spelled is an ancient wheat. At the beginning of the 20th century it was only cultivated in Asturias. In 1927, the Soviet biologist Nicolai Vavilov traveled to Spain in order to study its properties and collect seed samples, as part of his great project to create the world's first museum of cultivated plants. This is the story of the odyssey of an intrepid Indiana Jones of agriculture, one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, in search of spelled and other botanical treasures jealously preserved by generations of Spanish farmers, and those agronomists and biologists who accompanied him in his investigations. Almost two decades of research and travel have allowed Pablo Huerga Melcón to unravel many of the details of that unusual adventure, just one more chapter of an intense and committed scientific life, cut short by his tragic and heartbreaking fate.

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Pablo Huerga Melcón is a professor in the Department of Philosophy of the University of Oviedo. His doctoral thesis was the last directed by the philosopher Gustavo Bueno. He received the Extraordinary Bachelor's Prize in 1989, and the Asturian Letters Prize in 2009, for his book El fin de la Educación. Essay on a materialist philosophy of education (2009). He is also the author of Science at the Crossroads (1999), Let They Think (2003), The Other Side of Guernica (2011), Rear Window. A materialist poetics of cinema (2015), Gnoseology of the film The Mission (2017) and Welcome to the Machine. Machine and noise. Essay on a materialist poetics of Rock (2021).