RIP Carl Woese:
It seems that too often I'm writing about the passing of someone who, though not so well known, has had massive impact in technical areas.
Carl Woese was a biologist at the university I work at. His work didn't fit easily into the categories for Nobel prizes. It was more biological than just chemistry. It wasn't closely related enough to things clinical to be medicine. The Nobel's don't have an actual category for biology. At the time they were established, biology just didn't have the flare and impact that physics, chemistry, medicine, etc. did. It seemed an old stodgey place for obsessive butterfly collectors and the like.
This year, the well known journal Nature called for Woese to get the Nobel. That will never happen now, as it is not awarded posthumously.
What this man did was no less than rewriting substantial portions of even introductory biology textbooks.
Biologists are forever deciding what species are related to what other species, and how much difference there is between them. Usually this had been done by appearance or other somewhat subjective means, though it was a fairly solid part of biology.
In the 60s, Carl started using a methodical chemical method to do this sort of family tree tracing.
He worked out the use of certain genetically related chemical sequences (16s ribosmoal RNA) in bacteria and other cells to be able to determine what was really related to what and when they had split off from each other based on rates of mutation over time.
And, oh my, what a different tale it told than the standard "tree of life"
It turned out that many of the smallest lifeforms we had lumped together in the microscopic world really had very little in common. In fact, a whole new kingdom of life, the archea, had to be defined. The tree of life is still being actively rewritten as more genetic information is used to determine more accurately what and how closely related organisms are.
This was not easily accepted in the microbiological community. Scientists are conservative by nature, and here was someone from outside the traditional field (Woese was a physicist) who was telling them the equivalent of "everything you know is wrong".
This is only one of the areas he touched on. He also came up with the RNA world hypothesis for early life, and wrote heavily on a much larger amount of horizontal gene transfer in the evolution of early life. That last may ultimately have even larger implications to biology than his other work, but it is still a relatively new area of research. (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer_in_evolution )
I think history will accord more acclaim to Woese than the Nobel committee did. His contributions and the full ramifications will in time place him in the league of Linnaeus and perhaps nearly to the level of Darwin. That may sound overblown, but in this case, I think it's reasonable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woese
Carl Woese was a biologist at the university I work at. His work didn't fit easily into the categories for Nobel prizes. It was more biological than just chemistry. It wasn't closely related enough to things clinical to be medicine. The Nobel's don't have an actual category for biology. At the time they were established, biology just didn't have the flare and impact that physics, chemistry, medicine, etc. did. It seemed an old stodgey place for obsessive butterfly collectors and the like.
This year, the well known journal Nature called for Woese to get the Nobel. That will never happen now, as it is not awarded posthumously.
What this man did was no less than rewriting substantial portions of even introductory biology textbooks.
Biologists are forever deciding what species are related to what other species, and how much difference there is between them. Usually this had been done by appearance or other somewhat subjective means, though it was a fairly solid part of biology.
In the 60s, Carl started using a methodical chemical method to do this sort of family tree tracing.
He worked out the use of certain genetically related chemical sequences (16s ribosmoal RNA) in bacteria and other cells to be able to determine what was really related to what and when they had split off from each other based on rates of mutation over time.
And, oh my, what a different tale it told than the standard "tree of life"
It turned out that many of the smallest lifeforms we had lumped together in the microscopic world really had very little in common. In fact, a whole new kingdom of life, the archea, had to be defined. The tree of life is still being actively rewritten as more genetic information is used to determine more accurately what and how closely related organisms are.
This was not easily accepted in the microbiological community. Scientists are conservative by nature, and here was someone from outside the traditional field (Woese was a physicist) who was telling them the equivalent of "everything you know is wrong".
This is only one of the areas he touched on. He also came up with the RNA world hypothesis for early life, and wrote heavily on a much larger amount of horizontal gene transfer in the evolution of early life. That last may ultimately have even larger implications to biology than his other work, but it is still a relatively new area of research. (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer_in_evolution )
I think history will accord more acclaim to Woese than the Nobel committee did. His contributions and the full ramifications will in time place him in the league of Linnaeus and perhaps nearly to the level of Darwin. That may sound overblown, but in this case, I think it's reasonable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woese