Soil science was long relegated to lower status in histories of microbiology that emphasized the latter’s contribution to molecular biology. Soil microbiology, and other “applied” fields such as dairy microbiology, brewing, agriculture, and forestry, and “industrial microbiology,” produced a large part of the knowledge base of bacteriology from 1880 to 1950: yogurt and other fermented foods, the Weizmann acetoneebutanol fermentation and understanding acid mine drainage for instance. Yet they took a back seat in histories while disease microbiology got the primary attention.
This despite Pasteur’s ecological views of microbes. Only with the creation and industrial scale production of antibiotics from 1940 onwards did such applied microbiology acquire the prestige to be considered more as an integral part of the new molecular revolution in the life sciences. In William Bulloch’s standard 1938 History
of Bacteriology, for example, Vinogradskii gets only the briefest mention and soil science is not discussed at all