A sad loss for microbiology

It is with great sadness that we heard on Sunday 30th December of the death of Carl Woese, one of the fathers of modern microbiology. Carl was 84 and had been suffering from pancreatic cancer.

Few scientists can genuinely claim to have changed the way we look at life and its evolution, but alongside Charles Darwin we should now place Carl Woese. In the 1970s Woese was grappling with the age-old problem of bacterial phylogeny. His novel solution was to harness the emerging technique of nucleic acid sequencing, and use small-subunit ribosomal-RNA nucleotide sequence as a universal molecular chronometer. When he published his findings in 1977, Woese upset the taxonomic applecart by suggesting that prokaryotes are much more diverse than we had previously supposed ­ a group of anaerobic 'bacteria', which had been studied for years owing to their unique ability to generate methane, are not bacteria at all. There had been inklings that these microbes have some 'unbacterial' aspects, but rRNA phylogeny revealed that they are no more related to typical bacteria than they are to eukaryotes. Woese renamed this group of microorganisms Archaea and suggested that they be given equal footing with Bacteria and Eukarya. Unsurprisingly this proposal ran into stiff resistance. In fact, the ferocious attack on his work (notably by Salvador Luria and Ernst Mayr) turned Carl Woese into a reclusive figure, and in 1997 Science dubbed him "Microbiology's Scarred Revolutionary".

Despite numerous attempts to square the taxonomic circle, the three-domain system of Archaea, Bacteria and Eukarya has stood the test of time, and we are only now beginning to appreciate the staggering diversity of Archaea.

Twenty five years after his seminal paper, once the dust of controversy had settled, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Crafoord Prize in Biosciences to Carl Woese "for his discovery of a third domain of life". Thus his revolutionary idea had made the transition to scientific orthodoxy.

Max Planck once wrote "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." Carl Woese may be gone but his scientific truth will live forever.