Carl Woese
Carl Richard Woese ( [ woʊz ]; born July 15, 1928 in Syracuse, New York, † December 30, 2012 in Urbana, Illinois) was an American microbiologist and evolutionary biologist. He became known for his work on the evolution of cellular organization of bacteria and archaea, the genetic phylogeny and the introduction of archaea ( Archaea) as a new domain in addition to the bacteria ( Bacteria) and eukaryotes ( Eukaryota ). In 1967 he suggested the priority of the RNA on the DNA, a theory which was taken up in 1986 by Walter Gilbert and known as RNA - world hypothesis.
Career
In 1950 he graduated from Amherst College with a B. A. in from mathematics and physics. In 1953 he received his doctorate in biophysics at Yale University. From 1953 to 1960 he was a postdoctoral fellow in biophysics at Yale University continued to work.
From 1960 to 1963 he worked as a biophysicist at the General Electric Research Laboratory, then at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Since 1964, Woese was a professor of microbiology at the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign.
3- Domain Model
Carl Woese, Otto Kandler and proposed in 1990, the three kingdoms or five -kingdom model to be rejected in favor of a three - domain model: the domains of Bacteria, Archaea and Eukarya. Through the introduction of new domain Archaea they changed the base of the evolutionary tree. Woeses phylogenetic taxonomy based on the basis of genetic investigations ( comparative sequence analysis of the 16S ribosomal rRNA from many different microorganisms), in contrast to the previous arrangement according to phenotypic differences. The more similar organisms are their rRNA sequences, the closer related to each other. This earned him much criticism, even by famous biologists such as Salvador Luria and Ernst Mayr ( see links). Not without reason called the journal Science Woese as " Microbiology 's Scarred Revolutionary " ( which covered with scars revolutionary microbiology ). But the growing number of supporting data led the scientific community to accept the Archaea as a domain.
Horizontal gene transfer, Darwinian threshold
After Woese exchanged at the beginning of life organisms on their genes in a common gene pool free from ( horizontal gene transfer), without being able to come to a speciation. This free exchange of genetic innovation has been the driving force of early cell evolution. With increasing complexity of organisms that horizontal gene transfer was more difficult and the genes were not passed on to the living organisms in the neighborhood, but mainly to the direct descendants (vertical gene transfer). The limit at which the evolution is predominant means of mutation and selection, has called Carl Woese, the " Darwinian threshold" ( " Darwinian Threshold" ). Thus, Woese says farewell to Darwin's " principle of common descent", which states that life began with a primordial cell.
Awards
- MacArthur Fellowship in 1984
- Member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1988
- Leeuwenhoek Medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences 1992 - a prize which is awarded every ten years to a scientist who made outstanding contributions in the field of microbiology has done in the last decade
- Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology of the National Academy of Sciences 1997
- National Medal of Science ( USA) 2000
- Waksman Medal of Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University (USA ), 2000
- Crafoord Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2003 "for his discovery of a third domain of life" (for his discovery of a third domain of life)