Austrian-French biologist (1922–2013)
Émile Zuckerkandl |
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Born | (1922-07-04)4 July 1922
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Émile Zuckerkandl (July 4, 1922 – November 9, 2013) was an Austrian-born French biologist considered one of the founders of the field of molecular evolution.[1] He introduced, with Linus Pauling, the concept of the "molecular clock", which enabled the neutral theory of molecular evolution.
Life and work
Zuckerkandl was raised in
C. Ladd Prosser—then returned to the Sorbonne to complete a Ph.D. in biology. Zuckerkandl developed a strong interest in molecular problems; his early research at a
marine biology lab in
Roscoff emphasized the roles of
copper oxidases and
hemocyanin in the molting cycles of crabs. In 1957, Zuckerkandl met renowned chemist
Linus Pauling, who was becoming interested in molecular diseases and molecular evolution as an outgrowth of his activism on topics concerning nuclear power. They arranged a post-doctoral fellowship, and Zuckerkandl (now with his wife Jane) returned to the United States to work with Pauling at the
California Institute of Technology beginning in 1959.
[2] He was an atheist.
[3]
Linus Pauling and the molecular clock hypothesis
Zuckerkandl's first project under Pauling (working with graduate student Richard T. Jones) was the application of new protein identification techniques—a combination of
In 1962, Pauling and Zuckerkandl published their first paper using the
paleontological evidence for humans and horses. Though the paper did not provide any explanation for why amino acid differences in a protein should accumulate at a uniform rate (the essential assumption of the molecular clock), it did show that the results were fairly consistent with those of paleontologists.
[5]
During the succeeding years, Zuckerkandl worked to refine the molecular clock. In 1963, he and Pauling invented the term "
semantides" for biological sequences—DNA, RNA, and polypeptides—that have evolutionary information and argued that such sequences could be the basis for constructing molecular phylogenies, suggesting that the "molecular clock" method might be useful for other semantides besides proteins.
Emanuel Margoliash's first publication of sequence data for
cytochrome c allowed comparison of the rates of molecular evolution for different proteins (cytochrome c seemed to evolve faster than hemoglobin), which Zuckerkandl discussed at a 1964 conference in
Bruges. Zuckerkandl also adjusted the mathematics of the "clock" to account for the observation that some positions in an amino acid sequence were more stable than others, and the likelihood of multiple substitutions at the same position. In September 1964, he attended the important
Evolving Genes and Proteins symposium, where he and Pauling presented their most influential paper ("Evolutionary Divergence and Convergence in Proteins", published in the conference proceedings the next year). The paper, primarily Zuckerkandl's work, named the "evolutionary clock" and presented a derivation of its basic mathematical form. Though Zuckerkandl and Pauling saw the clock as compatible with
natural selection, it would later become the basis of the
neutral theory of molecular evolution, in which
genetic drift rather than selection is the driving force of evolution at the molecular level.
[6]
Later work
In 1965, Zuckerkandl moved back to France to direct in Montpellier, the "Centre de Recherche de Biochimie Macromoléculaire" of the
References
- ^ derStandard.at. "Emile Zuckerkandl 1922–2013 - Zeit" (in German). Derstandard.at. Retrieved 2013-11-20.
- ^ Gregory J. Morgan, "Emile Zuckerkandl, Linus Pauling, and the Molecular Evolutionary Clock, 1959-1965", Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 31 (1998), pp. 155-178. pp. 157, 159-161.
- ^ David Klinghoffer. "'Darwin Would Put God Out of Business'". Beliefnet, Inc. Retrieved 21 May 2013. The author is Emile Zuckerkandl of Stanford University. Prof. Zuckerkandl ferociously attacks ID and any belief in a designer, God, or other "superghost".
- ^ Gregory J. Morgan, "Emile Zuckerkandl, Linus Pauling, and the Molecular Evolutionary Clock, 1959-1965", Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 31 (1998), pp. 155-178. pp. 161-162.
- ^ Gregory J. Morgan, "Emile Zuckerkandl, Linus Pauling, and the Molecular Evolutionary Clock, 1959-1965", Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 31 (1998), pp. 155-178. pp. 163-166.
- ^ Gregory J. Morgan, "Emile Zuckerkandl, Linus Pauling, and the Molecular Evolutionary Clock, 1959-1965", Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 31 (1998), pp. 155-178. pp. 169-173.
- ^ Jay Aronson, "Profiles-Emile Zuckerkandl Archived 2007-06-25 at the Wayback Machine" (December 9, 2001), Documents in Molecular Evolution website. Accessed May 27, 2007.
- ^ Emile Zuckerkandl, "Social constructionism, a lost cause", Journal of Molecular Evolution, Vol. 51, Issue 6 (2000), pp. 517-9
- ^ Emile Zuckerkandl, "Intelligent design and biological complexity", Gene, Vol. 385 (2006), pp. 2-18
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