Renowned University of Illinois professor Carl R. Woese, who revolutionized biology with the discovery of a “third domain” of life, died Sunday at his home in Urbana. He was 84. Woese and his colleagues wrote two papers published in 1977 that overturned a universally held assumption about the basic structure of the tree of life, essentially adding a third primary divison of life. They reported that the microbes now known as archaea (are-KEY-uh) were as distinct from...
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