Biogeochemist

One of the world's great scientists died in Moscow last fortnight. He was almost unknown in the U.S. Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky was a cosmic thinker who founded a cosmic science which he called "biogeochemistry"--the study of life against the vast background of geological time.

By odd chance, for plain U.S. readers news of his death coincided with the first news of his life. The American Scientist went to press just before his death with a translation of an article in which Dr. Vernadsky summed up his lifelong studies of the universe. Its gist: man is entering a new age in which he may become the indisputable master of nature.

Lean, grey-bearded Vernadsky was one of Russia's best-loved scientists; tsars and Bolsheviks alike honored him. He became head of the University of Moscow's department of mineralogy in 1890, at 27; won a Stalin prize and the Order of the Red Banner of Labor; was given a big laboratory of his own in Moscow--the Vernadsky Laboratory of Geophysical Problems.* A fabulous reader, he used more books in his laboratory library each day than all his 50 assistants put together. He founded a Soviet commission on "the history of knowledge," was rated an expert in geology, chemistry, biology, physics and astronomy. A man of strong likes and dislikes, when traveling to France in 1936 he insisted on going by sea to avoid crossing Germany. Said he: "There is not one person left in that country whom I would care to meet."

The Biosphere. Vernadsky began as a mineralogist, soon enlarged his studies to embrace the whole "biosphere," which he denned as the area where life exists--from about two miles underground to the top of the atmosphere. He liked to put man in his place by pointing out that "living matter, by weight, constitutes an insignificant part of our planet" (roughly one-quarter of 1%), and that if all human beings were collected in one place they would occupy an area not quite as large as Switzerland's Lake Constance (208 sq. mi.).

World War I, said Vernadsky, "radically changed my geological conception of the world." In the vast perspective of the billions of years of geologic time, man has seemed to orthodox geologists a puny and perhaps temporary phenomenon. Geologically, the earth has not changed much in those billions of years. But Vernadsky, impressed by man's large-scale conversion of natural minerals to metals in World War I, advanced the "biogeochemical" theory that modern man's brain, rivaling in power the geological forces of wind and water, is radically transforming nature.

In his American Scientist article, Vernadsky attempted, like a man from Mars, to place mankind in geological perspective.

The Nooesphere. "In the 20th Century," he wrote, "man for the first time in the history of the earth knew and embraced the whole biosphere. . . . That mineralogical rarity, native [i.e., pure] iron, is now being produced by the billions of tons. Native aluminum, which never before existed on our planet, is now produced in any quantity. The same is true with regard to the countless number of artificial chemical combinations newly created on our planet. Chemically, the face of our planet, the biosphere, is being sharply changed by man.... New species and races of animals and plants are being created by man."

To describe this state of affairs, Vernadsky, who had a weakness for creating new tongue twisters, coined the term "nooesphere," from the Greek nods (mind) and sphere. Said he: "The nooesphere is a new geological phenomenon on our planet. In it for the first time man becomes a large-scale geological force.... Wider and wider creative possibilities open before him. It may be that the generation of our grandchildren will approach their blossoming. . . . Fairy-tale dreams appear possible in the future; man is striving to emerge beyond the boundaries of his planet into cosmic space. And he probably will do so."

* His son, George, a U.S. citizen since 1933, is a research professor in history at Yale, has written six books on Russian history.

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