Lynn Margulis and Boris Kozo-Polyansky: How the Symbiogenesis was translated from Russian

Abstract

This contribution details the complex history of the early work by Boris Kozo-Polyansky (1924) that became available in English translation 86 years after it was published in Russian. The great American naturalist Lynn Margulis—whose serial endosymbiosis theory was presciently predated by Kozo-Polyansky by four decades—was instrumental in organizing this resurrection and ‘horizontal transfer’ of knowledge, forgotten by that time even in Russia.