The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life. David Quammen
H, was abnormal. Some bacterial fragments were appearing where expected, as expected, yes. But some others looked eukaryotic, suggesting a completely distinct form of life: a yeast, a protozoan, what? And still others were just weird. What was this RNA? he wondered, and what manner of organism did it represent? It couldn’t be from a prokaryote. It wasn’t eukaryotic. It wasn’t from Mars, because it contained too many familiar stretches of RNA code. “Then it dawned on me,” he wrote. There was “something out there”—out there in the teeming ecosystems of planet Earth, he meant—other than prokaryotes and eukaryotes. A third form of life, separate.
Woese called this, whimsically, his “out-of-biology experience.” It would be the watershed moment of his scientific life.
After his death in December 2012, Woese’s files of scientific correspondence, manuscripts, journal articles, and other materials went to the University of Illinois Archives to be indexed, curated, and preserved. The archives are held in several different locations, one of which is the Archives Research Center, a sort of annex, housed in an old, barnlike building of red brick on Orchard Street near the south edge of the campus. A sign in front identifies this, confusingly but historically, as the Horticulture Field Laboratory; a bank of yew bushes and a riot of hostas guard the entrance. Inside, filed neatly in thirty-four boxes that can be accessed by request, are the Carl Woese Papers. I was working there at a table one hot July afternoon, reading through letters, looking for clues about the human side of this peculiar man, when John Franch arrived, wearing a dark T-shirt and a ball cap. Franch is the assistant archivist who was sent to clean out Woese’s lab after the funeral, and who knows the material found there better than anyone else. He had heard about my interest and wanted to show me something.
He led me toward the back of the building, where the roof arches high, and unlocked a door. This was one of the “vaults,” he told me, that formerly served for storing fruit—apples in particular—from the horticultural research orchards from which Orchard Street got its name. At one point, there were 125 varieties of apple grown just behind the building, and they came in by the basket and the crate to be stored here or pressed for cider and vinegar. Beyond the door, we entered an air-conditioned room, empty of apples now but lined along its left side with tall metal shelves, along its right side with tables. The shelves held hundreds of large, flat yellow boxes—the original packaging of Kodak medical X-ray films—representing the library of Woese’s RNA sequencing fingerprints. Each box was labeled along its edge with a date and the organism whose fragments were depicted.
Across the room, some films lay on the tables, where Franch had been working over them. He showed me three large sheets, carefully taped together, forming a triptych of images. I stared at the patterns of dark spots: amoebae galloping on a plain. To me, they made no particular sense. But to Woese, they had spoken eloquently of identity, relationship, evolution. If something was odd, he would have seen it.
This is delta H, Franch said.
Immediately after his epiphany, Woese shared it with George Fox, the postdoc he had assigned to work with Bill Balch on growing the methanogens. As recalled later by Fox, Woese “burst into my room in the adjoining lab” with the announcement that they had something unique. From there he proceeded throughout the lab, among his young students and assistants, “proclaiming that we had found a new form of life. He then pointed out,” by Fox’s memory, tart and amused, “that this was of course contingent on my having not screwed up the 16S rRNA isolation.” Being cautious, they repeated the whole process with delta H and got the same result. So no, Fox hadn’t screwed up.
“George was always skeptical,” Woese himself wrote later about their reactions to the discovery, adding that he valued such skepticism as good scientific instinct. Fox’s doctorate in chemical engineering suited him well to offset epiphanic leaps, even by the boss, with empirical caution. In fact, their shared instinct for skepticism about such a startling result helps explain why these two men worked so well together. But the anomalies in the fingerprints persuaded Fox too. By his account, they seemed to “jump off the page,” and he agreed that those differences suggested a third, very distinct form of life.
Still, Woese and Fox both knew that convincing other scientists of such an epochal discovery would be difficult. More data were needed. So the Woese lab went back to work, with Balch’s methodology and help, on culturing and fingerprinting still another methanogen. Woese and his colleagues worked quietly, for the time being. By the end of 1976, they had five additional genetic catalogs from five more methanogenic microbes, all quite different from one another but sharing signs of a much greater, much deeper, and shared difference from anything else known to exist.
Bacteria are versatile and diverse. That’s an understatement. Widespread—another understatement. They are hard to categorize, hard to identify, hard to sort into related groups, as even Stanier and van Niel finally admitted. They are nearly ubiquitous across most parts of Earth’s expanse, in both natural and human-made environments, floating through the air, coating surfaces everywhere, awash in the oceans, even present in rocks deep underground. Your skin as I’ve said is covered with them. Your gut is teeming. Your human cells may be outnumbered by them at a three-to-one ratio in your body. Bacteria live also in mudholes and hot springs and puddles and deserts, atop mountains, deep in mines and caves, on the tabletops at your favorite restaurant, and in the mouths of you and your dog.
A species called Bacillus infernus has been cultured from core samples of Triassic siltstone, buried strata at least 140 million years old, drilled up from almost two miles beneath eastern Virginia. Under the Pacific Ocean, 35,755 feet deep in the Mariana Trench, lie sediments that have also yielded living bacteria. In Antarctica, a body of water known as Subglacial Lake Whillans, lidded by half a mile’s thickness of ice and supercooled to just below zero, harbors a robust community of bacteria. They thrive there in the darkness and cold, eating sulphur and iron compounds from crushed rock.
Then again, some like it hot. Those are called thermophiles. Among the most famous of thermophilic bacteria is Thermus aquaticus, first cultured from a sample collected in Yellowstone National Park by the microbiologist Thomas Brock and a student, Hudson Freeze, in 1966. Brock and Freeze had found it in a steaming, multicolored pool called Mushroom Spring, in Yellowstone’s Norris Geyser Basin, at a temperature of about 156 degrees Fahrenheit. Functioning in such heat, Thermus aquaticus contains a specialized enzyme for copying its DNA, one that performs well at high temperatures, which became a key element in the polymerase chain reaction technique for amplifying DNA. That technique, widely useful in many aspects of genetic research and biotech engineering, earned its chief developer (but not Thomas Brock) a Nobel Prize.
Other heat-loving bacteria can be found around hydrothermal vents on the sea bottom, where they help anchor the food chains, producing their own organic material from dissolved sulfur compounds vented out with the hot water, and being fed upon by little crustaceans and other animals. A giant tube worm,