When Vinogradskii’s research underwent a resurgence in the
1920s while in exile in France, he began to actively describe what
he was doing as contributing to ecology, not only microbiology.
Note his own active role rhetorically, as well as via the discoveries
he made, in influencing where the boundary of ecology lay. At that
time he took up again his rhetorical campaign to get ecologists to
recognize the importance of findings from his “environmental
microbiology” and to get microbiologists to realize that standard
laboratory pure culture techniques would mislead them about (or
even outright conceal) microbes’ important ecological processes.
He emphasized that “studying microbes cultivated on artificial
milieu in conditions of pure culture revealed little about ‘the wild
[sauvage] existence of some species” (p. #). Cultivating a microbial
species in pure culturedsheltered from its vital and hypernutritional
competition’dproduced rather quickly, he thought, a plante
de cultureda new race very different from its ‘prototype.’ Drawing
on the distinction between wild and cultivated races of yeast
introduced long ago in the fermentation laboratories, he argued
that agricultural microbiology should avoid the inauthentic
‘ancient cultures of the laboratory’” (p. 110). Note again the
importance of craft knowledge from other “applied fields” such as
brewing microbiology, upon which he drew. From this time,
Vinogradskii developed his “Direct Method.