Because Russian was not widely read by Western scientists from
1880 to 1950, Ackert shows that it mattered a lot to the dissemination
of Vinogradskii’s ideas and methods that they were widely
promoted in English by Selman Waksman and Rene Dubos, much in
the same way it mattered that the work of the Chetverikov school
was promoted in the West by Dobzhansky and that Vernadksy’s
biosphere concept was promoted by ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson.
Waksman and Dubos were champions of soil microbiology at
Rutgers University, where it still thrives today. Ackert raises the
provocative question of the relationship between the black soil
(chernozem) of the Ukraine and southern Russia and the fact that
Vinogradskii, Dokuchaev and Waksman all hailed from this region
and found soil science so compelling. Interesting Russian folklore
about “the soil” notwithstanding, he wisely resists pronouncing any
simple deterministic conclusion, pointing out that in a region
where agriculture was so central to the economy, a famine in the
1890s could reasonably be expected to cause a lot of scientists to
turn toward understanding soil fertility and government to readily
fund such work. Dubos, of course, was not Russian, though he did
come from an agricultural region of France.