and the natural waters, but also their origin under different conditions and the places of their existence, their migration in the course of geological processes, and especially their biogenic migration as the result of the activity of living matter in the biosphere. That is why the titles of separate sections of Essays on Geochemistry contain the word history: history of carbon, of oxygen, and so on.
Vernadsky and other students at St. Petersburg University 1884
Although the scope of his scientific work was tremendous, Vernadsky never limited himself to it. Like many representatives of the Russian intelligentsia of his time, he was deeply concerned with social and political problems. He plunged into social activities early, in his student years. He was one of the founders of the first political party in Tsarist Russia – the Constitutional Democrats – and a member of its leading central committee. Twice he was elected a member of the State Council, the supreme elected body of Russia, where he expressed his emphatically democratic political views. In 1911, he resigned from Moscow University, along with twenty-one leading professors, in a collective protest against the Education Minister’s arbitrary rule. He then decided to give up teaching and to devote himself entirely to scientific work. After 1917, he gave up political and social activities as well.
All of Vernadsky’s scientific work was accompanied by extensive organizational activities: He attracted the interest of the Academy of Sciences, with its potential for scientific investigation, to the circle of scientific problems he was anticipating, or he created new branches in the Academy. In 1912, he founded the first radiochemical laboratory in Russia. In 1915, on his initiative, a committee of the Academy of Sciences was created to “study the natural productive forces of the country.” At first, it was meant to discover new sources of strategic ores, because Russia was taking part in World War I. He also included the study of uranium ore deposits as a task of the committee. He was chairman of this committee for fifteen years, until it became the State Geology Committee.
Vernadsky and other professors of Moscow University who resigned in 1911 in support of students’ protest against the Education Ministry
In 1926, at Vernadsky’s suggestion, the “Committee on the History of Science” was founded at the Academy of Sciences; Vernadsky remained its head until 1930. It later became the Institute of History of Natural Science and Technology which continues to carry out successful work together with a similar branch of the Smithsonian Institution in the United States.
During the Russian Civil War 1918–1921, he actively participated in the creation of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and became its first president. No matter where he lived during the most difficult years, he created new branches of scientific research, groups of scientists, and laboratories that proved long-lived because he founded them on new, fundamental scientific concepts and perspectives.
vernadsky’s teachings
Vernadsky’s idea that living beings possess a great geological significance in changing the Earth’s face gave birth to a new science – biogeochemistry. This concept increasingly interested Vernadsky and eventually became the main content of his creative work. Near the end of his life in 1944, he wrote as if summing up:
I spent the years of World War I in constant research and creative work, and I have been going on in the same direction up till now…. All these years, no matter where I was, I was captured by the thought of geochemical and biogeochemical manifestations in the surrounding nature (the biosphere).
These new geochemical and biogeochemical ideas did not enter the scientific mind of that time. Old notions reigned supreme in geology many years after Vernadsky’s works had been published. His thought was far ahead of his time, and he was not understood by many of his contemporaries. That is why the creation of biogeochemistry and the concepts of the biosphere not only manifests his scientific genius, but is also a striking example of the anticipatory power of this scientist, of his persistence in reaching the goal, of faith in his ideas, and of being able to work in most unfavorable conditions. We should remember that his most significant scientific achievements were made during the years of civil war and economic breakdown in Russia.
The central concept of Vernadsky’s teaching is that of the biosphere, but its definition in literature has been vague until now. Many people define it in an easy way as “the realm of life,” the territory of the planet inhabited by living organisms at any given time. But it is not quite like that. In Vernadsky’s understanding, the biosphere is a historic concept. It dates back to the very first manifestations of life on Earth – manifestations that created the oxygenated atmosphere and changed the planet’s surface in the course of life’s evolution, which is still ongoing. By “the biosphere,” Vernadsky meant all the layers of the planet, and first of all the layers of the Earth’s crust, that had undergone the influence of biogeochemical activity throughout its entire geological history. This idea of the historic character of the biosphere was shown rather recently in a large geological, geochemical, and paleontological work, a book by the Leningrad geologist Andrey Lapo that was translated into English as Traces of Bygone Biospheres (Synergetic Press, 1987).
Vernadsky in suburbs of Prague (circa 1928)
Vernadsky’s concept of the biosphere is as diverse and hierarchical as the structure of the actual biosphere. This concept integrates the data of all sciences that relate to the Earth, all biology, chemistry, and biochemistry. The growing specialization of the sciences has provided great progress in the knowledge of profound details and intimate mechanisms of life, without getting closer to understanding its essence. This widely acknowledged drawback of contemporary science consists in its failure to embrace Earth’s nature in all its scope and profundity, on a planetary and cosmic scale. Given this background, the concept of the biosphere, in its unprecedented scope and depth, is an excellent example of the integration of the sciences and a great event in the science of the twentieth century.
All this became possible due to the long-term and conscious approach to the integral study of any phenomenon in connection with other phenomena. Vernadsky wrote about the necessity of such an approach as long ago as the end of the nineteenth century, in his student diary; at that time the process of the specialization of science and its division into a number of specific disciplines and trends was only beginning. Later, in 1920, he privately recollected:
I have long been surprised at the lack of desire to embrace Nature as a whole in the field of empirical knowledge, whereas it is within our grasp to do so. Often we as scientists give only a mere collection of facts and observations where actually we could present the whole … It looks like some mental laziness. We feel that if we make an effort, we can rise to embracing the phenomenon as a whole, but this effort is not made, and judging by the literature nobody makes it.
Only much later, in the second half of the twentieth century, was this approach in science widely realized, acknowledged, defined and called integrative, systematic, global, etc. An example is provided by one of the fundamental principles of biology; namely, the unity of the organism and its environment. The briefest definition of this principle was probably given by the Russian physiologist I. M. Sechenov, who believed in the late nineteenth century that the description of an organism would not be complete without the description of its environment. Vernadsky came to affirm this principle on a different scale, independently and in his own way as a geologist and a biochemist, through ideas about the matter-energy connections of organisms and their environment in the biosphere. But he did not restrict the concept to an individual; he thought on the geological scale of the living matter of humankind as a whole. He wrote:
Humankind,
