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Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky: Biosphere Pioneer
| Article
# : |
19654 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1991 |
3,113 Words |
| Author
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George B. Kauffman
George B. Kauffman is professor of chemistry at California
State University, Fresno. A Guggenheim Fellow, he is a
contributing editor to four journals and the author of
fifteen
books and more than 950 articles on chemistry, the history of
science and technology, and chemical education. |
Following Nikita Khruschev's secret speech of February 24-25, 1956, denouncing Josef Stalin's brutal rule, Soviet intellectuals began to rediscover and rehabilitate the reputation of Russian scholars and scientists who had been neglected or disparaged during the Stalinist era for political reasons. Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945), the Ukrainian geochemist, mineralogist, biogeochemist, crystallographer, holistic naturalist, philosopher, and foremost proponent of the biosphere concept, was one of the Russian thinkers whose work was promoted and popularized during the 1960s and 1970s. By 1988, the 125th anniversary of his birth, he was hailed as standing on a par with Aristotle and Avicenna. Today, Vernadsky is widely revered in the USSR as a "Soviet cultural icon"; many of his books have been published posthumously; his face appears on a postage stamp, numerous public portraits, statues, and memorial lapel pins; his name graces a Moscow Metro station, a boulevard, a museum, and an institute for geochemistry and analytical chemistry; and a recent Russian novel even portrays Vernadsky as a figure fit for hero worship. In the USSR his name is as inseparably linked with the biosphere as Albert Einstein's name is with relativity.
Yet this great Russian patriot, one of the major Soviet scientists of the twentieth century, still remains largely unknown in the West, for almost none of his writings are available in English. When English atmospheric chemist James Lovelock proposed his Gaia hypothesis in 1972, he was unaware of Vernadsky's work, and it was not until the 1980s that he and Lynn Margulis, the foremost American exponent of the hypothesis, "discovered him to be [their] illustrious predecessor." Vernadsky was truly a man ahead of his time, and the fate of such persons is often that their ideas, revolutionary in their own day, are often now taken for granted.
Early years
Vernadsky was born in St. Petersburg (now Leningrad) on February 28 (according to the Julian calendar; March 12 according to the Gregorian calendar), 1863, into a noble Ukrainian family. His father, Ivan Vasil'evich Vernadsky, had pursued graduate studies in Western Europe and was an outstanding member of the liberal intelligentsia. A master of several European languages and a professor of political economy, he valued European science and culture. An opponent of serfdom and an active advocate of constitutional democracy in Russia, he espoused liberal causes in his weekly journal. Later his son would be similarly drawn to public life, practical work, and liberal causes, and, like his father, would frequently be forced to steer an uneasy course
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