1. Boris Mikhailovich Kozo-Polyansky was a Soviet and Russian botanist and evolutionary biologist, best known for his seminal work, Symbiogenesis: A New Principle of Evolution, which was the first work to place the theory of symbiogenesis into a Darwinian evolutionary context, as well as one of the first to redefine cell theory.
Boris Kozo-Polyansky was born in Ashgabat, which at the time was part of the Russian Empire.
Boris Kozo-Polyansky graduated from Moscow University in 1914 at the age of 24, before returning to Voronezh where he worked as an assistant at Voronezh Agricultural University until 1918.
Boris Kozo-Polyansky is buried in Voronezh at the Communist International Comintern Cemetery.
Boris Kozo-Polyansky became a professor of botany at the University of Voronezh in 1920.
Boris Kozo-Polyansky's research expounded upon and supported the euanthial origin of flowers and from this theory, he constructed an original phylogenetic system for angiosperms, and later for all terrestrial plant life.
Furthermore, during studies he conducted in the Timskaia Highland in Kursk Oblast, Kozo-Polyansky discovered an accumulation of relict plants.
Boris Kozo-Polyansky became the director of the Voronezh Botanical Gardens in 1937, which today are named in his honor.
In "The New Principle of Biology: An Essay on the Theory of Symbiogenesis" Boris Kozo-Polyansky posited many novel theories and observations that had yet been developed by other biologists.
Boris Kozo-Polyansky ultimately posited that symbiogenesis was a source of evolutionary novelty and that Darwinian mechanisms, such as natural selection, were responsible for maintaining the heritable changes brought about by symbiotic interactions.
However, the works of other symbiogeneticists and Boris Kozo-Polyansky were brought back into academic consciousness in 1967 by the work of Lynn Margulis who independently proposed a near identical theory to Boris Kozo-Polyansky's.
Boris Kozo-Polyansky's theories were first published to the West in 1979 by Khakhina's book on the history of the theory of symbiogenesis.