"In the 1920s, a brilliant young Russian botanist synthesized the experimental work of evolutionary biologists across the world in order to theorize that symbiogenesis-the merging of separate organisms to form a single organism-played a leading role in evolution. Working from this fundamental idea, the botanist, Boris Mikhailovich Kozo-Polyansky, went on to broad-sweeping speculations, collecting examples of symbiogenetic systems from all groups of living organisms, and reconciling his new theory of symbiogenesis with the Darwinian evolutionary ideas of the early 1920s, well before the development of the neo-Darwinist New Synthesis theory that emerged in the 1930s and '40s.
Many years before any evidence for horizontal transfer of genes and genomes entered the mainstream of biological thought, Kozo-Polyansky suggested that cells are in fact not just elementary units of life but cooperative systems (he in fact used the word "system").The original Russian book was published in 1924, and its little-known author died in 1957. Kozo-Polyansky's evolutionary ideas were ridiculed and forgotten. (...) Similar concepts (...)proposed in 1970s-1980s eventually found their way into scientific establishment, being spectacularly confirmed by the advances of cell and molecular biology in the 1980s-1990s."
