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Selman
Waksman, Sergei Winogradsky: His Life and Work, The Life of
a Great Bacteriologist, 1953
In 1949, at the age of 93, Sergei Winogradsky
(1856-1953) made one final effort to establish
his legacy in the history of science. He concluded
his scientific career by synthesizing his life’s
work in a 900-page compendium entitled (in French)
Soil Microbiology: Problems and Methods, Fifty
Years of Investigations. He entitled his
book Soil Microbiology, but, revealingly, he structured
it as a history of his contributions to ecology.
Organizing it thematically, according to research
subject, he consistently directed his readers
to the ecological significance of his work. As
a final statement of this, he ended his tome with
an essay on “The Principles of Ecological
Microbiology, A Synthesis.” Writing in 1945,
Winogradsky traced “the remote origin of
this new branch of the grand microbiological science”
to Louis Pasteur’s concept of “the
role of the ‘infiniment petits’ in
nature.” Winogradsky understood what historians
of science have only begun to understand—that
ecology owes a substantial debt to microbiology. |
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Erasmus
Darwin, Zoonomia, 1793 |
Charles
Darwin, On the Formation of Vegetable Matter by Worms, 1881 |
Alexander
von Humboldt, Cosmos, 1858 |
Dumas
and Boussingault, Balance of Organic Matter, 1844 |
Ferdinand
Cohn, Bacteria, The Smallest Living Beings, 1872 |
Louis
Pasteur, Etudes sur la Biere, 1862 |
Selman
Waksman, Sergei Winogradsky, 1953 |
Selman
Waksman, Humus, 1939 |
Vladimir
Vernadsky, Principles of Biogeochemistry, 1960 |
James
Lovelock, An Homage to Gaia, 1985 |
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Lloyd
Ackert
Whitney Humanities Center
Yale University
53 Wall Street
P.O. Box 208298
New Haven, CT 06520-8298
Office: (203).432.3112
lloydackert@sbcglobal.net |
The
Sterling Memorial Exhibit is located in the Overflow Case
to the left of the circulation desk. The Sterling Memorial
Library is located at
120 High Street
Yale University
New Haven, CT 06520
Map, Directions
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