University of Illinois microbiology and Institute for Genomic Biology professor Carl R. Woese was hailed by colleagues as one of the great evolutionary biologists of the 20th century, a scientist who took a primarily subjective field and turned it on its ear. Mr. Woese and colleagues published two papers in 1977 that went against a universal assumption that there were two components to the evolutionary tree of life — bacteria and everything else. The scientists reported that the microbes now known as archaea were as distinct from bacteria as plants and animals. The discovery not only added archaea as a third main branch of the evolutionary family tree, it had wide-ranging and practical...
↧