Georgii Gause

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Georgii Frantsevitch Gause (Георгий Францевич Гаузе) (December 27, 1910–May 4, 1986), more correctly transliterated but less often spelled Gauze in the Latin alphabet, was the Russian biologist who proposed the competitive exclusion principle, fundamental to the science of ecology. He would devote most of his later life to the research of antibiotics.

Gause earned his BSc at Moscow University in 1931 and his DBiolSc in 1940. There he worked on the structure of populations of microorganisms in culture. In 1932 he published what has become known as the competitive exclusion principle, based on experimental work done with mixed cultures of yeast species and Paramecium cultures. This principle asserts that no two species with similar ecological features can coexist indefinitely on the same limiting resource. Intuitively, this means that when two species compete for exactly the same food requirements, one will be at least slightly more efficient than the other and will produce more offspring as a result. Soon the other species will die out in the area. Gause came out with this when studying microscopic lifeforms in a test tube and extended his conclusion to any type of life. This culminated in the 1934 publication entitled The Struggle for Existence. Gause initiated in 1940, a collaboration between Disinfection Institute and Moscow's ecology laboratory and suggested to Petr Sergiev, the Minister of Public Health, that a special laboratory for work on antibiotics was created. In 1942 Gause was appointed deputy, and later director, of the newly formed instituted named, quite aptly, the New Antibiotics Research Institute, Moscow.