Carl Woese, a professor of microbiology at the University of Illinois' Urbana campus, has added significantly to this growing body of knowledge, and for this he recently was awarded the prestigious Leeuwenhoek Medal.
Given once a decade by the Science Division of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the medal is awarded for outstanding contributions to the study of microbiology.
"Before I got into the game, microbiologists had no biogenetic evolutionary tree," Woese explains. "What I did was construct that tree."
In 1977, Woese rocked the microbiological world with a paper (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 74:5088-90) claiming that not two, but three distinct types of microorganisms existed, dispelling a belief held for centuries (The Scientist, May 14, 1990, page 22).
He discovered evidence of a new form of life called archaeabacteria, now commonly referred to as just Archaea. The existence of the Archaea organisms, according ...
