Lynn Margulis

First Person | Lynn Margulis Courtesy of Lynn Margulis Despite being eligible for Social Security, geneticist and symbiogenesis proponent Lynn Margulis prefers doing what 10-year-old boys like to do: hiking, camping, exploring the wilds, reading. "I can't think of any greater punishment than a smoky bar," she says. "I've worked every Saturday night of my life." This National Medal of Science winner does not sit still. An avid swimmer, she eschews television, because the "discrepancy between what I know is true, and the way it comes across, is so large." For Margulis, who teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, finding, and disseminating, the truth are passions. What she wants is for protoctists, the organisms she describes as "water neithers"--neither animal nor plant--to attain a proper level of respect in the world of microbiology. "I am so frustrated at the lack of attention given to slime molds, all the algae, all the traditional protozoa ... they all are protoctists. They are not like animals." Biology, she says, "is in such a state of confusion due to ignorance. Nobody sees the importance for cell biology, because they don't know about protoctists' existence." Do you ever collapse on the couch? Never ... I escape to the woods. What is your goal? I am really interested in the evolution of the nucleated cell, correlated with the geological time scale. Living protoctists can tell us how the nucleus evolved. Are you having trouble getting funded? NASA had granted us since 1972. I have zero funding now. I don't pass peer review. I do have help from the university. My critics say, 'She hasn't proved her hypothesis after 15 years.' I say, the money I need is very small. I need money to support the colleagues working for me. Are you bitter? No, I'm just realistic. Are you fighting your own little war? I refuse to do what people tell me to do. That's always been my problem. The critics say I need proof by molecular biology ... but classical biology is perfectly good science, just obscure. To make a contribution to evolution, one has to be broad. People tried to tell me what science to do, and I don't do what they say. Have you ever been bored? I remember as a child being very bored. It's very important to me not to be bored. I find science vastly more interesting than dealing directly with people. Where were you raised? On the south side of Chicago ... It was like being raised in a war zone. Girls carried razor blades in their garters; there was always racial tension. This was the impetus for me to escape into nature, into science. ... I was 14 when I went to the University of Chicago. Have you ever thrown in the towel? I quit my job as a wife twice. But as far as scientific motivation, I never tailored the science to what I know could get funded. What concerns you? I am worried about the erosion of classical knowledge. People have to make news to get their grants. You said you don't take postdocs because of funding. What kind of grad students do you take? I never take a straight-A student. A real scientist tends to be critical, and somewhere along the line, they had to rebel against their teachers. What is your favorite paper? It's a PNAS paper; it is very specific and broad at the same time.1 The problem with that paper, [is that people] can only read one or two sentences and they say 'sure.' Are you a maverick? I don't like being called a maverick. But if I see things that clearly shouldn't be the way they are portrayed, I have no problem saying what I feel. Tell us about your current video project. I am almost finished a 15-minute video on eukaryosis, and I've been putting this thing together for years, since the 1970s .... The main contributions are made by L.R. Cleveland ... a [deceased] Harvard professor, and another person, Harold Kirby, who lived from 1900 to 1952. He was chairman of the zoology department at the University of California, Berkeley. Both of those people were acknowledged to be brilliant scientists. I've asked colleagues who remember these men, and they said, 'I knew them,' and I asked them what did they do? And they couldn't tell me. Cleveland and Kirby were so far ahead of their time that nobody has integrated their work into common knowledge. Their science is dismissed as humanities, [as if] it's not science anymore, it's too old. My colleagues lack historical perspective. If it weren't for these two men, we couldn't make this model of the origin of nucleated cells. Our work doesn't cure any diseases, it doesn't make money .... I am interested in intrinsic science. 1. L. Margulis, "Archaeal-eubacterial mergers in the origin of Eukarya: Phylogenetic classification of life," Proc Natl Acad Sci, 93:1071-6, 1996. function sendData() { document.frm.pathName.value = location.pathname; result = false if (document.frm.score[0].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[1].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[2].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[3].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[4].checked) result = true; if (!result) alert("Please select") return result; } .myradio{background-color : #94bee5} Please indicate on a 1 - 5 scale how strongly you would recommend this article to your colleagues? Not recommended 1 2 3 4 5 Highly recommended Please register your vote

Lynn Margulis

The Scientist Staff

First Person | Lynn Margulis

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