Carl Woese

Carl Woese (July 15, 1928 – December 30, 2012) was an American microbiologist and biophysicist.

Carl Richard Wösenkraft was born in Syracuse, New York on July 15, 1928.

His family was German American.

Woese attended Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts.

He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from Amherst College in 1950.

During his time at Amherst, Woese took only one biology course (Biochemistry, in his senior year) and had "no scientific interest in plants and animals" until advised by William M. Fairbank, then an assistant professor of physics at Amherst, to pursue biophysics at Yale.

In 1953, he completed a PhD in biophysics at Yale University, where his doctoral research focused on the inactivation of viruses by heat and ionizing radiation.

He studied medicine at the University of Rochester for two years, quitting two days into a pediatrics rotation.

Then he became a postdoctoral researcher in biophysics at Yale University investigating bacterial spores.

Interest among physicists and molecular biologists had begun to coalesce around deciphering the correspondence between the twenty amino acids and the four letter alphabet of nucleic acid bases in the decade following James D. Watson, Francis Crick, and Rosalind Franklin's discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953.

Woese published a series of papers on the topic.

In one, he deduced a correspondence table between what was then known as "soluble RNA" and DNA based upon their respective base pair ratios.

He then re-evaluated experimental data associated with the hypothesis that viruses used one base, rather than a triplet, to encode each amino acid, and suggested 18 codons, correctly predicting one for proline.

Other work established the mechanistic basis of protein translation, but in Woese's view, largely overlooked the genetic code's evolutionary origins as an afterthought.

From 1960 to 1963, he worked as a biophysicist at the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York.

Woese turned his attention to the genetic code while setting up his lab at General Electric's Knolls Laboratory in the fall of 1960.

In 1962, Woese spent several months as a visiting researcher at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, a locus of intense activity on the molecular biology of gene expression and gene regulation.

In a highly influential 1962 paper, Roger Stanier and C. B. van Niel first established the division of cellular organization into prokaryotes and eukaryotes, defining prokaryotes as those organisms lacking a cell nucleus.

Adapted from Édouard Chatton's generalization, Stanier and Van Niel's concept was quickly accepted as the most important distinction among organisms; yet they were nevertheless skeptical of microbiologists' attempts to construct a natural phylogenetic classification of bacteria.

However, it became generally assumed that all life shared a common prokaryotic (implied by the Greek root πρό (pro-), before, in front of) ancestor.

In 1964, Woese joined the microbiology faculty of the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, where he focused on Archaea, genomics, and molecular evolution as his areas of expertise.

While in Paris, he met Sol Spiegelman, who invited Woese to visit the University of Illinois after hearing his research goals; at this visit Spiegelman offered Woese a position with immediate tenure beginning in the fall of 1964.

With the freedom to patiently pursue more speculative threads of inquiry outside the mainstream of biological research, Woese began to consider the genetic code in evolutionary terms, asking how the codon assignments and their translation into an amino acid sequence might have evolved.

For much of the 20th century, prokaryotes were regarded as a single group of organisms and classified based on their biochemistry, morphology and metabolism.

He also originated the RNA world hypothesis in 1967, although not by that name.

Woese held the Stanley O. Ikenberry Chair and was professor of microbiology at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign.

Woese is famous for defining the Archaea (a new domain of life) in 1977 through a pioneering phylogenetic taxonomy of 16S ribosomal RNA, a technique that has revolutionized microbiology.

In 1977, Carl Woese and George E. Fox experimentally disproved this universally held hypothesis about the basic structure of the tree of life.

Woese and Fox discovered a kind of microbial life which they called the “archaebacteria” (Archaea).

They reported that the archaebacteria comprised "a third kingdom" of life as distinct from bacteria as plants and animals.

Having defined Archaea as a new "urkingdom" (later domain) which were neither bacteria nor eukaryotes, Woese redrew the taxonomic tree.

His three-domain system, based on phylogenetic relationships rather than obvious morphological similarities, divided life into 23 main divisions, incorporated within three domains: Bacteria, Archaea, and Eucarya.

Acceptance of the validity of Woese's phylogenetically valid classification was a slow process.

Prominent biologists including Salvador Luria and Ernst Mayr objected to his division of the prokaryotes.

Not all criticism of him was restricted to the scientific level.

A decade of labor-intensive oligonucleotide cataloging left him with a reputation as "a crank," and Woese would go on to be dubbed as "Microbiology's Scarred Revolutionary" by a news article printed in the journal Science.

The growing body of supporting data led the scientific community to accept the Archaea by the mid-1980s.

Today, few scientists cling to the idea of a unified Prokarya.

Woese died on December 30, 2012, following complications from pancreatic cancer, leaving as survivors his wife Gabriella and a son and daughter.

He became a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign's Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, which was renamed in his honor in 2015, after his death.