11 Facts About Vasily Omelianski

Vasily Leonidovich Omelianski was a Russian microbiologist and author of the first original Russian text book on microbiology.

Vasily Omelianski was the only student of Sergei Winogradsky and succeeded him as head of the department of General Microbiology at the Institute of Experimental Medicine in Saint Petersburg.

In 1885 or 1886, Vasily Omelianski enrolled in the natural history division of the physico-mathematical faculty of the University of Saint Petersburg.

Vasily Omelianski had conceived this text from his lectures he held on a women's college since 1906 or 1909.

In 1916, Omelianski became a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and he was appointed to Doctor botanicus h c without examination in 1917.

Vasily Omelianski was married and had a daughter, Maria Vasilevna Stepanova.

In springtime 1927, Vasily Omelianski travelled to the Pasteur Institute in Paris to visit his mentor Winogradsky.

Vasily Omelianski had a second heart attack in December 1927 but could recover.

Vasily Omelianski was a gifted chess player who entered into competitions as a student, a reportedly gifted portraitist and wrote several short-stories, four of which have since been stored in the archive at the Russian Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg.

Certainly, Vasily Omelianski was one of the founding fathers of methanogenesis research and the first scientist investigating methanogenic fermentation of cellulose and ethanol systematically.

Vasily Omelianski even discovered hydrogen as a product of cellulose fermentation around 1900 but, of course, did not discover the concept of syntrophic electron transfer.