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Lynn Margulis

 
Scientist: Lynn Margulis

American biologist (1938–)

Margulis was educated at the university in her native city of Chicago, at Wisconsin, and at Berkeley where she obtained her PhD in 1965. After working briefly at Brandeis she moved to Boston University in 1966 and served there as professor of biology from 1977 to 1988. She became Distinguished Professor of the University of Massachusetts in 1988.

With the success of modern biochemistry, genetics, and cytology it became apparent that there was a fundamental division in nature between cells with nuclei (eukaryotes) and those without (prokaryotes). In terms of metabolism, chemistry, genetics, and structure, higher organisms differ radically from bacteria and blue-green algae, the prokaryotes. She studied the question of how eukaryotes evolve and her answer, in terms of hereditary endosymbiosis, was fully formulated in her Origin of Eukaryotic Cells (1970). She argued that eukaryotes are basically colonies of prokaryotes and that such features of cells as mitochondria were once free-living bacteria but have, “over a long period of time, established a hereditary symbiosis with ancestral hosts that ultimately evolved into animal cells.” Similarly she proposes that chloroplasts and flagella evolved in the same way.

The actual evolutionary sequence proposed begins with a ‘fermenting bacterium’ entering into a symbiotic relationship with some oxygen-using bacteria, the first mitochondria. Such a complex might join with “a second group of symbionts, flagellum-like bacteria comparable to modern spirochaetes,” which, attached to the host's surface, would greatly increase its motility.

As Margulis points out, the proof for such an imaginative model requires that the cell organelles are separated, cultured independently, and then brought back into symbiotic association again. So far no one has managed to grow an organelle outside the cell. Margulis published (with Karlene Schwartz) “a catalog of the world's living diversity” in Five Kingdoms (1982).

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Biography: Lynn Margulis
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Lynn Margulis (born 1938) is a renowned theoretical biologist and professor of botany at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her research on the evolutionary links between cells containing nuclei (eukaryotes) and cells without nuclei (prokaryotes) led her to formulate a symbiotic theory of evolution that was initially spurned in the scientific community but has become more widely accepted.

Margulis, the eldest of four daughters, was born in Chicago on March 5, 1938. Her father, Morris Alexander, was a lawyer who owned a company that developed and marketed a long-lasting thermoplastic material used to mark streets and highways. He also served as an assistant state's attorney for the state of Illinois. Her mother, Leone, operated a travel agency. When Margulis was fifteen, she completed her second year at Hyde Park High School and was accepted into an early entrant program at the University of Chicago.

Margulis was particularly inspired by her science courses, in large part because reading assignments consisted not of textbooks but of the original works of the world's great scientists. A course in natural science made an immediate impression and would influence her life, raising questions that she has pursued throughout her career: What is heredity? How do genetic components influence the development of offspring? What are the common bonds between generations? While at the University of Chicago she met Carl Sagan, then a graduate student in physics. At the age of nineteen, she married Sagan, received a B.A. in liberal arts, and moved to Madison, Wisconsin, to pursue a joint master's degree in zoology and genetics at the University of Wisconsin under the guidance of noted cell biologist Hans Ris. In 1960 she and Sagan moved to the University of California at Berkeley, where she conducted genetic research for her doctoral dissertation.

The marriage to Sagan ended before she received her doctorate. She moved to Waltham, Massachusetts, with her two sons, Dorion and Jeremy, to accept a position as lecturer in the department of biology at Brandeis University. She was awarded her Ph.D. in 1965. The following year, she became an adjunct assistant of biology at Boston University, leaving twenty-two years later as full professor. During her tenure at Boston University she taught two or three courses per semester and directed a $100,000-a-year research lab. In 1967 she married crystallographer Thomas N. Margulis. The couple had two children before they divorced in 1980. Since 1988, Margulis has been a distinguished university professor with the Department of Botany at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Her interest in genetics and the development of cells can be traced to her earliest days as a University of Chicago undergraduate. She always questioned the commonly accepted theories of genetics, however, challenging the traditionalists by presenting hypotheses that contradicted current beliefs. She has been called the most gifted theoretical biologist of her generation by numerous colleagues. A profile of Margulis by Jeanne McDermott in the Smithsonian quotes Peter Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden and a MacArthur fellow: "Her mind keeps shooting off sparks. Some critics say she's off in left field. To me she's one of the most exciting, original thinkers in the whole field of biology." Although few know more about cellular biology, Margulis considers herself a "microbial evolutionist," mapping out a field of study that doesn't in fact exist.

As a graduate student, Margulis became interested in cases of non-Mendelian inheritance, occurring when the genetic make-up of a cell's descendants cannot be traced solely to the genes in a cell's nucleus. For several years, she concentrated her research on a search for genes in the cytoplasm of cells, the area outside of the cell's nucleus. In the early 1960s, Margulis presented evidence for the existence of extranuclear genes. She and other researchers had found DNA in the cytoplasm of plant cells, indicating that heredity in higher organisms is not solely determined by genetic information carried in the cell nucleus. Her continued work in this field led her to formulate the serial endosymbiotic theory, or SET, which offered a new approach to evolution as well as an account of the origin of cells with nuclei.

Prokaryotes - bacteria and blue-green algae, now commonly referred to as cyanobacteria - are single-celled organisms that carry genetic material in the cytoplasm. Margulis proposes that eukaryotes (cells with nuclei) evolved when different kinds of prokaryotes formed symbiotic systems to enhance their chances for survival. The first such symbiotic fusion would have taken place between fermenting bacteria and oxygen-using bacteria. All cells with nuclei, Margulis contends, are derived from bacteria that formed symbiotic relationships with other primordial bacteria some two billion years ago. It has now become widely accepted that mitochondria - those components of eukaryotic cells that process oxygen - are remnants of oxygen-using bacteria. Margulis' hypothesis that cell hairs, found in a vast array of eukaryotic cells, descend from another group of primordial bacteria much like the modern spirochaete still encounters resistance, however.

The resistance to Margulis' work in microbiology may perhaps be explained by its implications for the more theoretical aspects of evolutionary theory. Evolutionary theorists, particularly in the English-speaking countries, have always put a particular emphasis on the notion that competition for scarce resources leads to the survival of the most well-adapted representatives of a species by natural selection, favoring adaptive genetic mutations. According to Margulis, natural selection as traditionally defined cannot account for the "creative novelty" to be found in evolutionary history. She argues instead that the primary mechanism driving biological change is symbiosis, while competition plays a secondary role.

Margulis doesn't limit her concept of symbiosis to the origin of plant and animal cells. She subscribes to the "Gaia" hypothesis first formulated by James E. Lovelock, British inventor and chemist. The "Gaia theory" (named for the Greek goddess of the earth) essentially states that all life, as well as the oceans, the atmosphere, and the earth itself are parts of a single, all-encompassing symbiosis and may fruitfully be considered as elements of a single organism.

Margulis has authored more than one hundred and thirty scientific articles and ten books, several of which are written with her son Dorion. She has also served on more than two dozen committees, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Nominating Committee, and the editorial boards of several scientific journals. Margulis is co-director of NASA's Planetary Biology Internship Program and, in 1983, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Further Reading

"The Creativity of Symbiosis," in Scientific American, Volume 266, Number 1, 1992, p. 131.

McCoy, Dan, "The Wizard of Ooze," in Omni, Volume 7, Number 49, 1985, pp. 49-78.

McDermott, Jeanne, "A Biologist Whose Heresy Redraws Earth's Tree of Life," in Smithsonian, Volume 20, Number 72, 1989, pp. 72-80.

"The Microbes' Mardi Gras," in Economist, Volume 314, Number 7643, 1990, pp. 85-86.

Wikipedia: Lynn Margulis
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Lynn Margulis

Born March 5, 1938 (1938-03-05) (age 71)
Chicago
Nationality United States
Fields Biology
Known for Endosymbiotic theory
Notable awards Proctor

Lynn Margulis (born March 5, 1938) is an American biologist and University Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.[1] She is best known for her theory on the origin of eukaryotic organelles, and her contributions to the endosymbiotic theory—which is now generally accepted for how certain organelles were formed.

Contents

Research

Endosymbiotic theory

Lynn Margulis attended the University of Chicago as an undergraduate, earned a master's degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1960, and received her Ph.D. in 1963 from UC Berkeley. In 1966, as a young faculty member at Boston University, she wrote a theoretical paper entitled The Origin of Mitosing Eukaryotic Cells.[2] The paper however was "rejected by about fifteen scientific journals," Margulis recalled.[3] It was finally accepted by The Journal of Theoretical Biology and is considered today a landmark in modern endosymbiotic theory. Although it draws heavily on symbiosis ideas first put forward by mid-19th century scientists and by Merezhkovsky (1905) and Wallin (1920) in the early-20th century, Margulis's endosymbiotic theory formulation is the first to rely on direct microbiological observations (as opposed to paleontological or zoological observations which were previously the norm for new works in evolutionary biology). The paper was initially heavily rejected, as symbiosis theories had been dismissed by mainstream biology at the time. Weathering constant criticism of her ideas for decades, Margulis is famous for her tenacity in pushing her theory forward, despite the opposition she faced at the time.

The underlying theme of endosymbiotic theory, as formulated in 1966, was interdependence and cooperative existence of multiple prokaryotic organisms; one organism engulfed another, yet both survived and eventually evolved over millions of years into eukaryotic cells. Her 1970 book, Origin of Eukaryotic Cells, discusses her early work pertaining to this organelle genesis theory in detail. Currently, her endosymbiotic theory is recognized as the key method by which some organelles have arisen (see endosymbiotic theory for a discussion) and is widely accepted by mainstream scientists. The endosymbiotic theory of organogenesis gained strong support in the 1980s, when the genetic material of mitochondria and chloroplasts was found to be different from that of the symbiont's nuclear DNA.[4]

In 1995, prominent evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins had this to say about Lynn Margulis and her work:

I greatly admire Lynn Margulis's sheer courage and stamina in sticking by the endosymbiosis theory, and carrying it through from being an unorthodoxy to an orthodoxy. I'm referring to the theory that the eukaryotic cell is a symbiotic union of primitive prokaryotic cells. This is one of the great achievements of twentieth-century evolutionary biology, and I greatly admire her for it.[5]

Theory of symbiotic relationships driving evolution

She later formulated a theory to explain how symbiotic relationships between organisms of often different phyla or kingdoms are the driving force of evolution. Genetic variation is proposed to occur mainly as a result of transfer of nuclear information between bacterial cells or viruses and eukaryotic cells. While her organelle genesis ideas are widely accepted, symbiotic relationships as a current method of introducing genetic variation is something of a fringe idea. However, examination of the results from the Human Genome Project lends some credence to an endosymbiotic theory of evolution[citation needed]—or at the very least Margulis's endosymbiotic theory is the catalyst for current ideas about the composition of the human genome[citation needed]. Significant portions of the human genome are either bacterial or viral in origin—some clearly ancient insertions, while others are more recent in origin. This strongly supports the idea of symbiotic—and more likely parasitic—relationships being a driving force for genetic change in humans, and likely all organisms[citation needed]. It should be noted that while the endosymbiotic theory has historically been juxtaposed to Neo-Darwinism as a competitor, the two theories are not irreconcilable. An emerging synthesis holds that natural selection works on many levels (genetic up to the ecosystem) and variation is introduced both at the genetic and the cellular level[citation needed].

She does, however, hold a negative view of certain interpretations of Neo-Darwinism, excessively focused on inter-organismic competition, as she believes that history will ultimately judge them as comprising "a minor twentieth-century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon Biology."[6] She also believes that proponents of the standard theory "wallow in their zoological, capitalistic, competitive, cost-benefit interpretation of Darwin - having mistaken him... Neo-Darwinism, which insists on (the slow accrual of mutations by gene-level natural selection), is a complete funk."[6]

She opposes such competition-oriented views of evolution, stressing the importance of symbiotic or cooperative relationships between species.

Controversy

In addition to rejecting Neo-Darwinian evolution as an explanation for diversity, Margulis holds a number of opinions outside of mainstream science. In 2009 she co-authored a paper [7] arguing that AIDS is not caused by HIV, but by the spirochete that causes syphillis. This is largely rejected[8] by the scientific community, and disproven by the efficacy of antiretroviral therapy in the treatment of AIDS. In 2009 she also pushed the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) to publish a paper by Donald I. Williamson arguing that butterflies are the result of hybridization of a now extinct insect and velvet worms[9][10]. As a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Margulis has the privilege of "communicating" scientific papers, allowing them to be published with minimal review. Williamson's paper provoked immediate response from the scientific community, including a paper in PNAS [11]. Developmental Biologist and Professor at Duke university Fred Nijhout was quoted as saying that the paper was better suited for "National Enquirer than the National Academy."[10]. The controversy has led to the elimination of communication by PNAS.

Other

  • Margulis was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983 and served as Chairman of the Academy’s Space Science Board Committee on Planetary Biology and Chemical Evolution.
  • guest Hagey Lecturer, University of Waterloo, 1985 [4]
  • She was inducted into the World Academy of Art and Science, the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences between 1995 and 1998.
  • In 1998 the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, announced that it would permanently archive Dr. Margulis' papers.
  • In 1999 she received the Proctor Prize for scientific achievement.
  • In 1999, she was awarded the National Medal of Science by President William J. Clinton.
  • She is also a proponent and co-developer of the modern version of Gaia hypothesis, based on an idea developed by the English atmospheric scientist James Lovelock.
  • She is profiled in a book published in 2006 by Resurgence Magazine in the UK, called Visionaries: The 20th Century's 100 Most Important Inspirational Leaders.
  • In 2006 with her son Dorion, she founded Sciencewriters Books, an imprint of Chelsea Green Publishing for science books.
  • In 2007 she expressed her support for a new investigation of the September 11, 2001 attacks.[12]
  • In 2008 she was one of thirteen recipients of the Darwin-Wallace Medal, which, until now, has only been bestowed every 50 years, by the Linnean Society of London.
  • In March 2009 she spoke at the Biological Evolution Facts and Theories Conference held at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome aimed at promoting dialogue between evolutionary biology and Christianity.

Personal

She attended the University of Chicago at age 14 having entered 'because she wanted to go and they let me in' [13]

She married her first husband at age 19. She was the first wife of astronomer Carl Sagan, and is the mother of Dorion Sagan, popular science writer and co-author; Jeremy Sagan, software developer and founder of Sagan Technology; Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma, New York City criminal defense lawyer; and Jennifer Margulis, teacher and author.[citation needed]

See also

Publications and bibliography

  • Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan, 2007, Dazzle Gradually: Reflections on the Nature of Nature, Sciencewriters Books, ISBN 978-1-933392-31-8
  • Margulis, Lynn and Eduardo Punset, eds., 2007 Mind, Life and Universe: Conversations with Great Scientists of Our Time, Sciencewriters Books, ISBN 978-1-933392-61-5
  • Margulis, Lynn, 2007, Luminous Fish: Tales of Science and Love, Sciencewriters Books, ISBN 978-1-933392-33-2
  • Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan, 2002, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species, Perseus Books Group, ISBN 0-465-04391-7
  • Margulis, Lynn, et al., 2002, The Ice Chronicles: The Quest to Understand Global Climate Change, University of New Hampshire, ISBN 1-58465-062-1
  • Margulis, Lynn, 1998, Symbiotic Planet : A New Look at Evolution, Basic Books, ISBN 0-465-07271-2
  • Margulis, Lynn and Karlene V. Schwartz, 1997, Five Kingdoms: An Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth, W.H. Freeman & Company, ISBN 0-613-92338-3
  • Margulis, Lynn and Dorian Sagan, 1997, What Is Sex?, Simon and Shuster, ISBN 0-684-82691-7
  • Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan, 1997, Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis, and Evolution, Copernicus Books, ISBN 0-387-94927-5
  • Sagan, Dorion and Lynn Margulis, 1993, The Garden of Microbial Delights: A Practical Guide to the Subvisible World, Kendall/Hunt, ISBN 0840385293
  • Margulis, Lynn, 1992, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution: Microbial Communities in the Archean and Proterozoic Eons, W.H. Freeman, ISBN 0-7167-7028-8
  • Margulis, Lynn, ed, 1991, Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation: Speciation and Morphogenesis, The MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-13269-9
  • Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan, 1991, Mystery Dance: On the Evolution of Human Sexuality, Summit Books, ISBN 0-671-63341-4
  • Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan, 1987, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors, HarperCollins, ISBN 0-04-570015-X
  • Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan, 1986, Origins of Sex : Three Billion Years of Genetic Recombination, Yale University Press, ISBN 0-300-03340-0
  • Margulis, Lynn, 1982, Early Life, Science Books International, ISBN 0-86720-005-7
  • Margulis, Lynn, 1970, Origin of Eukaryotic Cells, Yale University Press, ISBN 0-300-01353-1

References

  1. ^ Lynn Margulis biography at U. Mass. (Accessed July 15, 2006)
  2. ^ Lynn Sagan (1967). "On the origin of mitosing cells". J Theor Bio. 14 (3): 255–274. doi:10.1016/0022-5193(67)90079-3. PMID 11541392. 
  3. ^ John Brockman, The Third Culture, New York: Touchstone, 1995, 135.
  4. ^ Acceptance Doesn't Come Easy (Accessed July 15, 2006)
  5. ^ John Brockman, The Third Culture, New York: Touchstone, 1995, 144.
  6. ^ a b Mann, C. (1991) "Lynn Margulis: Science's Unruly Earth Mother," Science, 252, 378-381
  7. ^ [1] Spirochete round bodies. Syphilis, Lyme disease & AIDS: Resurgence of “the great imitator”?, SYMBIOSIS Vol. 47, No. 1 (2009), pp. 51-58
  8. ^ "The Evidence that HIV Causes AIDS". National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. 2009-09-04. http://www3.niaid.nih.gov/topics/HIVAIDS/Understanding/howHIVCausesAIDS/HIVcausesAIDS.htm. Retrieved 2009-10-14. 
  9. ^ [2] Caterpillars evolved from onychophorans by hybridogenesis, PNAS (2009)
  10. ^ a b [3] Controversial caterpillar-evolution study formally rebutted, Scientific American Online
  11. ^ http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/10/22/0910229106] Caterpillars did not evolve from onychophorans by hybridogenesis, PNAS (2009)
  12. ^ UMass scientist a 9/11 doubter, Kristin Palpini, The Daily Hampshire Gazette, 9/11/07
  13. ^ BBC Radio 4 "A Life With...(Series 5) - A life with Microbes, Broadcast 16 July 2009"
  • Interview and portrait of Lynn Margulis by Ariane Laroux in Portraits Parlés, éditions l'Age d'Homme (2006)

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