17 Facts About Carl Woese

1.

Carl Richard Woese was an American microbiologist and biophysicist.

2.

Carl Woese originated the RNA world hypothesis in 1967, although not by that name.

3.

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

4.

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

5.

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

6.

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

7.

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

8.

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

9.

Carl Woese 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.

10.

In 1962, Carl 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.

11.

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

12.

Carl Woese speculated about an era of rapid evolution in which considerable horizontal gene transfer occurred between organisms.

13.

In later years, Carl Woese's work concentrated on genomic analysis to elucidate the significance of horizontal gene transfer for evolution.

14.

Carl Woese worked on detailed analyses of the phylogenies of the aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases and on the effect of horizontal gene transfer on the distribution of those key enzymes among organisms.

15.

Carl Woese shared his thoughts on the past, present, and future of biology in Current Biology:.

16.

Carl Woese considered biology to have an "all-important" role in society.

17.

Carl Woese was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2004.