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...
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