Free Nature in the Laboratory

Abstract

Vinogradskii developed his approach during the laboratory revolution, when scientists increasingly distinguished between lab and field research. Two parallel developments characterized this revolution—on the one hand, laboratory-builders appropriated the natural to authenticate their experimental practices, and on the other, natural historians (field scientists) drew on the authority of heroic adventure to validate their research. Even by the 1890s, when laboratory standards came to dominate the biological sciences, some researchers in nascent disciplines such as microbiology and ecology preserved their natural history perspectives. Vinogradskii, for example, was able to synthesize his laboratory and natural research due in part to his commitment to a conceptual and rhetorical strategy of making “direct observations.” For him, viewing an organism’s physiological processes microscopically and in artificial cultures gave the data he collected in the laboratory and the field the same epistemological status. For him, organisms developed the physiological characteristics that defined their ‘true’ roles in the cycle of life in the plenum of nature’s complexity. By eliminating that complexity using controlled laboratory environments and careful observational techniques, he believed he could decipher these roles. Vinogradskii’s grand vision of the cycle of life—and the methods by which he transformed it into an experimental laboratory investigation—would guide his later research and constitute his great legacy to an international school of soil microbiologists in the twentieth century.