28 February] 1863 – 6 January 1945), was a Russian, Ukrainian,[5] and Soviet mineralogist and geochemist who is considered one of the founders of geochemistry, biogeochemistry, and radiogeology.

Scacchi's condition led Vernadsky to go to Germany to study under Paul Groth, curator of minerals in the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

Vernadsky learned to use Groth's modern equipment, which included a machine to study the optical, thermal, elastic, magnetic and electrical properties of crystals.

The future scientist recalled that before moving from Kharkiv to St. Petersburg, he and his father were abroad and in Milan, they read about a circular in Pyotr Lavrov's newspaper "Forward" that forbade printing in Ukrainian in Russia.

He asked his father in detail about Shevchenko, Kulish, Maksymovich, Kvitka-Osnovianenko, whom he knew personally, as well as about the Cyril-Methodiev brotherhood, about Kostomarov, etc.

[17][18][19][20][16][21] Vernadsky participated in the First General Congress of the zemstvos, held in Petersburg on the eve of the 1905 Russian Revolution to discuss how best to pressure the government to the needs of the Russian society; became a member of the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party (KD); and served in parliament, resigning to protest the Tsar's proroguing of the Duma.

He served as professor and later as vice rector of Moscow University, from which he also resigned in 1911 in protest over the government's reactionary policies [citation needed].

Following the advent of the First World War, his proposal for the establishment of the Commission for the Study of the Natural Productive Forces (KEPS) was adopted by the Imperial Academy of Sciences in February 1915.

[25] Vernadsky first popularized the concept of the noosphere and deepened the idea of the biosphere to the meaning largely recognized by today's scientific community.

However, he was one of the first scientists to recognize that the oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere result from biological processes.

During the Russian Civil War, he hosted gatherings of the young intellectuals who later founded the émigré Eurasianism movement.

[27] In the late 1930s and early 1940s Vernadsky played an early advisory role in the Soviet atomic bomb project, as one of the most forceful voices arguing for the exploitation of nuclear power, the surveying of Soviet uranium sources, and having nuclear fission research conducted at his Radium Institute.

UNESCO sponsored an international scientific conference, "Globalistics-2013", at Moscow State University on 23–25 October 2013, in honor of Vernadsky's 150th birthday.