Ackert’s book, then, makes a significant contribution to filling in
a little-noticed but important part of both the history of microbiology
and the history of ecology. He shows, further, how the two
fields came to overlap through the work of Vinogradskii and to a
lesser extent, of Beijerinck in Delft, Holland. Ackert shows that
much as Robert Koch was able to transform bacterial pathogens
into a tool of laboratory-based experimental medicine, Vinogradskii
took a nebulous, quasi-romantic concept,d“the cycle of
life,” and translated it into a powerful experimental program
(p. xiv). He imbibed a vague “cycle of life” concept from his mentor
the botanist Famintsyn. But Vinogradskii’s studies on sulfur bacteria,
iron bacteria and his discovery of nitrification led him to the
general concept of chemosynthetic “autotrophism,” i.e., the ability
of numerous microbes in nature to derive energy for their life
processes from inorganic chemical reactions rather than from
photosynthesis or from heterotrophy. As outlined in chap. 5, this
discovery allowed Vinogradskii to transform himself from a plant
physiologistdbacteria were considered plants at this timedto an
ecologist between 1890 and 1920. For every important chemical
transformation in the great nutrient cycles of nature, the cycle of
life concept convinced Vinogradskii that there was a specific
microbe whose task was that particular transformation. Thus, he
sought a nitrifying organism and found itdtwo actually, Nitrosomonas
and Nitrobacter, since nitrification turned out to be a twostep
process. Similarly, he sought a nitrogen fixing organism and
also found it. (Martinus Beijerinck in Delft found more of these).
The problems Vinogradskii worked on were inherently interdisciplinary.
Thus, one of the most important contributions of
Ackert’s story is tracing Vinogradskii’s path across semi-fluid late-
19th century disciplinary boundaries: from plant physiology, into
microbiology, through soil science to ecology, geochemistry and
biogeochemistry. This study sheds helpful light on where those
boundaries were, but also on how they were changing, not least
because of Vinogradskii’s own research contributions. For this map
of developing, interacting disciplines alone, the book is an important
contribution