Woese, Carl R.

▪ 2004

      For his revolutionary discovery of what the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences termed “a third domain of life,” microbiologist Carl Woese, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was awarded the annual $500,000 Crafoord Prize in Biosciences in 2003. The award was given by the academy for accomplishments in fields other than those covered by the Nobel Prizes.

      Prior to 1977 and Woese's seminal paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), many biologists believed that all life on Earth belongs to one of two primary lineages—the eukaryotes, which include animals, plants, fungi, and some single-cell organisms, and the prokaryotes, which include bacteria and all remaining microscopic organisms. Woese, working with microbiologist Ralph S. Wolfe, determined that prokaryotes actually comprise two distinctly different groups of organisms and should be divided into two categories: true bacteria (eubacteria) and the newly recognized archaea (archaebacteria). Archaea are aquatic or terrestrial microorganisms that differ both biochemically and genetically from true bacteria. Some thrive in—and actually require—extreme environments, including very hot or saline ones; some live in the absence of oxygen. Because such conditions resemble Earth's early environment, archaea are thought to hold important information about the evolution of cells.

      In 1996 Woese and colleagues from the University of Illinois and the Institute for Genomic Research, Rockville, Md., published in the journal Science the first complete genome, or full genetic blueprint, of an organism in the archaea domain and concluded that archaea are more closely related “to us”—eukaryotes—than to bacteria. In two later papers that were published in PNAS in 1998 and 2000, Woese took his theory a giant step farther by proposing a new model to replace the standard Darwinian theory of common descent—that all life on Earth evolved from a single cell or precell. Woese proposed instead that various forms of life evolved independently from as many as several dozen ancestral precells.

      Woese was born July 15, 1928, in Syracuse, N.Y. He attended Amherst (Mass.) College, from which he received a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics in 1950; he was awarded a Ph.D. in biophysics by Yale University in 1953. After stints as a researcher at Yale (1953–60), the General Electric Research Laboratory (1960–63), and the Pasteur Institute in Paris (1962), in 1964 Woese joined the faculty at the University of Illinois, where he held the Stanley O. Ikenberry Endowed Chair. Among his many honours were a MacArthur fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (1984), election to the National Academy of Sciences (1988), the Dutch Royal Academy of Science's Leeuwenhoek Medal, the highest honour in microbiology (1992), and the U.S. National Medal of Science (2000).

Anthony G. Craine

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