y American microbiologists Robert Breed and H. J. Conn.
Consider how vital Vinogradskii’s ecological insight was to such
ecologists as Dubos and Waksman, who in the 1930s began looking
for antibiotics produced by soil organisms such as actinomycetes
and succeeded in finding streptomycin, for example. The very
reason the active compounds are produced by one soil microbe is to
suppress its competing species of microbe in the nutritionally
limited soil environment. If one tried to coax the production of such
a compound in pure culture without understanding this fact,
outright failure would result more often than not. In Koch’s world of
pure cultures and dead, stained bacteria it might have been difficult
to even conceive of antibiotics; it required conceiving of microbes
as ecological actors competing in soil and water with other microbes.
So ironically, Vinogradskii’s “ecological” microbiology made
a major contribution to medical microbiology as well. Dubos was
one of the first, using the same reasoning in 1945, to argue that the
overuse of antibiotics would speed up development of antibiotic
resistant strains of bacteria. It is worth reflecting on how much less
serious this problem might have been today if Vinogradskii’s
ecological insights had penetrated sooner into medical thinking