The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life. David Quammen

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      George Fox was no longer a rangy young man when I sat with him in a nondescript pizza parlor near the campus in Urbana, after the opening session of a Carl Woese memorial symposium, and watched him eat a nondescript little pizza. Fox is a man who prefers simple, plain food, and he had cringed when I ordered pepperoni and mushrooms on my own. At age sixty-nine, he carried the full body and slight jowls of a lifetime spent in laboratories and classrooms; wire-rim spectacles had replaced the dark horn-rimmed glasses he had worn in the 1970s photos, and his brown hair was graying at the temples, but his eyes still shined brightly blue as he recalled the days and years with Woese. Now a professor at the University of Houston, Fox had flown up for the Woese meeting, which was hosted by the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (its name reflecting the fact that Woese has become a venerated brand at the University of Illinois). Fox would give one of the invited talks.

      He had spent his academic career at three institutions: Houston, for almost three decades; preceded by Illinois, as a postdoc with Woese; and before that it was Syracuse University, as an undergraduate and PhD student. The circumstances of Fox’s arrival in Urbana were haphazard, beginning from a coincidence in Syracuse, where Woese himself grew up. There at the university, Fox belonged to a professional engineering fraternity, Theta Tau, of which Carl Woese’s father—also named Carl Woese—was a founder, and so Fox was required to know the name. As he shifted interest from chemical engineering to theoretical biology, he noticed and became fascinated by some of the early work of Carl Woese the son. In particular, there was a paper on what Woese called a “ratchet” mechanism of protein production by ribosomes—a risky proposal, a wild and interesting idea (later proven wrong in its details), published in 1970. So Fox wrote to this ratchet guy asking for a postdoc fellowship, and Woese seemed to see the Syracuse connection as karma. He had a position to fill, yes, with the departure of Mitch Sogin, the ultimate handyman grad student, and he offered that to Fox.

      “We did not discuss salary,” Fox said over his pizza and Coke. “He never sent me a letter offering the position. It was all completely verbal.” On such assurance, Fox got married and showed up in Urbana that autumn with his wife. Arriving unannounced, he encountered a man at the lab door, an unprepossessing figure in jeans and a drab shirt, with a chain holding a huge bunch of keys. “He looked like the goddamn janitor.” Fox gave his name and prepared to talk his way in. “No!? Welcome!” It was Woese.

      “He sat me down in his office and …” Fox hesitated. “You got a piece of paper?” On a yellow sheet from my legal pad, he began sketching the layout of the lab. He drew a long rectangle and subdivided it. There were three major rooms, he explained, and the middle room, here, held the light table, where Carl usually worked. Linda Magrum and Ken Luehrsen were here, in the left room. Over here on the right side of the center room was Carl’s little personal office and the electrophoresis room. The radiation room and the darkroom were across the hall, and then storage, three more spaces barely bigger than closets. Woese gave Fox a table in his office, Fox said, with a door that stayed open, “so he could see me.” Like the young Luehrsen, only more so, as a postdoc, Fox was on probation.

      At the beginning, Woese assigned him to assembling sequences from 5S rRNA, the shortest and least informative of the ribosomal RNA molecules, as a way of getting up to speed on what the lab was doing. That project yielded some unexpected results, impelling Woese to try to make Fox an experimentalist. But it wasn’t his forte, and he knew that. He wanted to do the sort of “theoretical stuff,” the deep evolutionary analysis of molecular data—what would now be called bioinformatics—that Woese himself did. Reading the code, drawing conclusions that went back three billion years and more. Woese, on the other hand, wanted him to generate data. “I was under a lot of pressure,” Fox recalled—the pressure of Woese’s expectations versus his own interests and skills. “What I had to do was, every other day, come up with a novel insight, so that he would continue to allow me to work on the sequence comparison project.” Failing that impossible standard, he was banished back to the lab, set to the tasks of growing hot cells and extracting their ribosomal RNA. But Fox continued, in flashes, to show his value to Woese as a thinker. Gradually he proved himself, not just sufficiently to work on sequence comparisons but well enough to become Woese’s trusted partner, as well as the sole coauthor on the culminating paper in 1977, with its announcement of a third kingdom of life.

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      Wondering how that announcement was greeted by the scientific community at the time, I had put the question to Ralph Wolfe, several months before the pizza with George Fox.

      “It was a disaster,” Wolfe said mildly. Then he explained, with the sympathy of friendship, why Woese’s declaration of a third kingdom—the substance of the claim, and the manner in which Woese made it—had sounded discordantly to many of their peers. The crux of the problem was a press release.

      Woese’s lab had been supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the latter under its exobiology program (devoted to extraterrestrial biology, in case there is any), presumably because grant administrators felt that his research on early evolution might help illuminate the question of life on other planets. As the first PNAS paper in the methanogens-aren’t-bacteria series moved toward publication, Woese acceded to a suggestion from the federal agencies and allowed a public announcement of his findings from Washington, rather than just letting the article drop in the journal’s November issue and speak for itself—which was how science, in those days, was customarily done. Ralph Wolfe knew nothing about this, despite his close connection with the work, until one day when a mutual acquaintance let slip that the press release would appear tomorrow. “What press release?” Wolfe asked.

      The cat was out. It was an indelicate situation. “A few minutes later,” Wolfe told me, “Carl was in my office, explaining.”

      Wolfe showed no dudgeon as he recounted this. The human comedy is various, not always funny; Woese’s lapse was just a miscommunication between friends, a misstep by a colleague he held in high regard. To understand what went wrong, you had to consider an insult Woese had suffered years earlier, a hurt he had carried long afterward. “He presented a paper in Paris,” Wolfe said. It was on the ratchet model, the same clever but incorrect idea that later caught George Fox’s interest. Woese had conceived this brainstorm—a conceptual construct for how ribosomes work in manufacturing proteins—and called it a Reciprocating Ratchet Mechanism, by which RNA cranks through the ribosome structure, adding amino acids to the protein chain, a notch forward, and then a reload, and then another notch forward, but never a notch back.

      “He didn’t present any evidence for it,” Wolfe said. “He just presented this as a concept.” The audience at the Paris meeting may have included luminaries such as Jacques Monod, François Jacob, and Francis Crick, whom he knew a bit better than the others. “It was the last paper before lunch,” Wolfe said, “and nobody asked any questions. They all got up, and left, and went to lunch. And this hurt Carl. It was almost a mortal wound. He was just so offended by the behavior of these scientists. He told me that ‘I resolve next time they will not ignore me.’ And so this was the rationale behind his press release.”

      The press release went out from Washington, presumably with an embargo to the date of journal publication. On November 2, 1977, the third kingdom became an open topic for all comers. The following day, based on that alert and three hours with Woese in his office, a reporter for the Times told the story on page 1, beneath the photo I’ve already mentioned—of Woese with his Adidas on a messy desk—and a headline emphasizing the ancientness theme: “Scientists Discover