Excerpt
LYNN MARGULIS
Scholar of Symbiosis
“Admonish your students, friends and family: Study nature in nature.”
“Amid all the recent interest in complexity, many point out that the future of science belongs more to biology, the study of complex systems, than to physics.”
LYNN MARGULIS HAS HELD the title of Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, since 1989. She is the author of over 150 published articles and author or co-author of over forty books, with more honours and appointments than would fit this page.
Her topics include original contributions to cell biology and microbial evolution. Perhaps Margulis’s most dramatic contribution, her theory of symbiogenesis put forth in Acquiring Genomes (2002) co-authored with her son, Dorion Sagan, is still challenged. It states that evolution, or more accurately speciation, does not occur by random mutation alone but by symbiotic detente reached by organisms of different taxa to create new species. She postulates that it is an intimacy of strangers which becomes part of the engine of life and moves onward to accelerate the process of change. She claims that ancient symbiosis generated the cells of all the species we can see with the unaided eye. In fact the fossil record does not show gradual changes between closely related species but rather a jump from one to a different species. There is no evidence that gradual accumulation of random mutations by itself, she says, leads to new species.
Hers is a revolutionary theory even today! Scientists, like the rest of us, hold their cherished beliefs tightly. Lynn Margulis moves too quickly for that. There is simply no time to hold on to beliefs. New information and theories demand that they be fluid.
Fluent in Spanish and French, Margulis was raised on the south side of Chicago, where she received a solid liberal arts education. After years as elementary school and college student at the University of Chicago, she graduated at age nineteen. She moved on to the University of Wisconsin in Madison where she studied genetics and zoology, much of it under the tutelage of Professor Hans Ris. Margulis’s research on chloroplast DNA at the University of California, Berkeley, led to her PhD in genetics.
Scientific researchers in the real world, she discovered, can be contentious. Scientists can be arrogant, ambitious, political and idiosyncratic, particularly the very talented ones at institutions of higher learning. After thirty-four years of uninterrupted NASA funding for her research, Margulis now receives no public money. She failed ‘peer review’ and is grateful to the University of Massachusetts and two private donors for providing the wherewithal to continue her radical science.
A groundbreaker in so many ways, since the mid-1970s Margulis has aided James Lovelock in documenting his Gaia theory, a way of looking at the Earth as alive. Gaia theory posits that the Earth’s surface interactions among living beings, sediment, air and water have created a vast selfregulating system.
A generation ago all life was classified as either plant or animal. That was how it was assumed to be, and taught in schools everywhere. In part as a result of her challenge to that assumption, the living things of the Earth are now classified in five kingdoms, or three, but not in only two. Fungi are not plants without chlorophyll; amoebae are not single-celled animals. A universe of single and multicellular organisms with and without nuclei exists in addition to animals, plants and fungi. Those lacking nuclei are the bacteria, without which there would be no life anywhere on Earth.
Margulis’s classic book, Five Kingdoms: An Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth, third edition (1998), co-authored with K. V. Schwartz, provides a consistent formal classification of all our planetmates. Her Symbiosis in Cell Evolution: Microbial Communities in the Archean and Proterozoic Eons, second edition, (1993) is the precursor and logical basis for this work. Having established the bacterial origins of both chloroplasts and mitochondria, her current work is to prove the last postulate of her cell symbiosis theory: oviduct cilia, rod and cone cilia of the retina, sperm tails and the “waving feet” of protists— structures identical to each other when viewed at very high magnification—began as the same free-swimming bacterium.
These wily, mud-dwelling and tissue-penetrating bacterial ancestors, by hypothesis, belong to a group called spirochetes, many kinds of which thrive today. She and her colleagues and their students collect and study spirochetes from mud flats in Spain at the delta of the Ebro River and from microbial mat communities near Woods Hole, Massachusetts. They take photographs of spirochetes and other bacteria that grow and incessantly swim in the back end of the digestive system (the hindgut) of wood-eating termites.
Except for a few scientists and close friends familiar with certain arcane facts in the professional biological literature, nobody agrees with her spirochete hypothesis of the origin of cilia.
Margulis now helps with the exhibit on the diversity of life that opens in the magnificent, expanded Barcelona Museum of Science (Spain) in late 2006. She is very enthusiastic about this newly furbished museum, which she calls utterly amazing. The classification in the new biodiversity exhibit of bacteria, protoctists (algae including the seaweeds, slime molds, water molds), fungi, animals and plants reflects the scheme presented in the Margulis and Schwartz book.
Margulis was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983, and received the 1999 National Medal of Science from President Clinton. In 1998 The Library of Congress announced that it will permanently archive her papers.
Bob Lebensold
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