Allan Wilson | |
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 Allan C. Wilson (courtesy of the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution) | |
| Born | Allan Charles Wilson (1934-10-18)18 October 1934 Ngāruawāhia, New Zealand |
| Died | 21 July 1991(1991-07-21) (aged 56) Seattle, United States |
| Citizenship | New Zealand |
| Education |
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| Known for | Molecular clock Mitochondrial Eve |
| Awards | MacArthur Fellowship |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | |
| Institutions | University of California, Berkeley |
| Thesis | Control of flavin synthesis by bacteria (1961) |
| Doctoral advisor | Arthur Pardee |
| Other academic advisors | Nathan O. Kaplan |
| Notable students | Svante Pääbo Mary-Claire King Vincent Sarich Rebecca L. Cann Mark Stoneking |
Allan Charles WilsonFRSAAA&S (18 October 1934 – 21 July 1991) was a New Zealand biologist and biochemist, who was a professor ofbiochemistry at theUniversity of California, Berkeley, a pioneer in the use ofmolecular approaches to understandevolutionary change and reconstructphylogenies, and a revolutionary contributor to the study ofhuman evolution. He was one of the most significant figures in post-warbiology; his work attracted a great deal of attention both from within and outside the academic world. He is the only New Zealander to have won theMacArthur Fellowship.[1]
He is best known for experimental demonstration of the concept of themolecular clock (with his doctoral studentVincent Sarich), which was theoretically postulated byLinus Pauling andEmile Zuckerkandl, revolutionary insights into the nature of themolecular anthropology of higherprimates and human evolution, and the so-calledMitochondrial Eve hypothesis (with his doctoral studentsRebecca L. Cann andMark Stoneking).[2][3]
Allan Wilson was born inNgāruawāhia,New Zealand, and raised on his family's rural dairy farm at Helvetia,Pukekohe, about twenty miles south ofAuckland. At his local Sunday School, the vicar's wife was impressed by young Allan's interest in evolution and encouraged Allan's mother to enroll him at the eliteKing's College secondary school inAuckland. There he excelled inmathematics,chemistry, and sports. Wilson already had an interest in evolution andbiochemistry, but intended to be the first in his family to attend university by pursuing studies in agriculture and animal science. Wilson met ProfessorCampbell Percy McMeekan, a New Zealand pioneer inanimal science, who suggested that Wilson attend theUniversity of Otago in southern New Zealand to further his study in biochemistry rather thanveterinary science.[4] Wilson gained a BSc from theUniversity of Otago in 1955, majoring in both zoology and biochemistry. The bird physiologistDonald S. Farner met Wilson as an undergraduate at Otago and invited him toWashington State University atPullman as his graduate student. Wilson obliged and completed a master's degree in zoology at WSU under Farner in 1957, where he worked on the effects ofphotoperiod on the physiology of birds.[5][6]
Wilson then moved to theUniversity of California, Berkeley, to pursue his doctoral research. At the time the family thought Allan would only be gone two years. Instead, Wilson remained in the United States, gaining his PhD at Berkeley in 1961 under the direction of biochemistArthur Pardee for work on the regulation offlavin biosynthesis in bacteria.[7] From 1961 to 1964, Wilson studied as a post-doc under biochemistNathan O. Kaplan atBrandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.[8] In Kaplan's lab, working withlactate andmalate dehydrogenases,[9] Wilson was first introduced to the nascent field ofmolecular evolution.[10][11][12] Nate Kaplan was one of the very earliest pioneers to address phylogenetic problems with evidence from protein molecules,[13][14] an approach that Wilson later famously applied to human evolution and primate relationships. After Brandeis, Wilson returned to Berkeley where he set up his own lab in the Biochemistry department, remaining there for the rest of his life.[5][15]
Wilson joined theUC Berkeley faculty of biochemistry in 1964, and was promoted to full professor in 1972.[8] His first major scientific contribution was published asImmunological Time-Scale For Hominid Evolution in the journalScience in December 1967.[16] With his studentVincent Sarich,[17][18] he showed thatevolutionary relationships of the humanspecies with otherprimates, in particular thegreat apes (humans,chimpanzees,gorillas andorangutans), could be inferred from molecular evidence obtained from living species, rather than solely fromfossils of extinct creatures. Their microcomplement fixation method (seecomplement system) measured the strength of theimmune reaction between anantigen (serum albumin) from one species and anantibody raised against the same antigen in another species. The strength of the antibody-antigen reaction was known to be stronger between more closely related species: their innovation was to measure it quantitatively among many species pairs as an "immunological distance". When these distances were plotted against the divergence times of species pair with well-established evolutionary histories, the data showed that the molecular difference increased linearly with time, in what was termed a "molecular clock". Given this calibration curve, the time of divergence between species pairs with unknown or uncertain fossil histories could be inferred. Most controversially, their data suggested that divergence times between humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas were on the order of 3~5 million years, far less than the estimates of 9~30 million years accepted by conventionalpaleoanthropologists from fossilhominids such asRamapithecus. This 'recent origin' theory of human/ape divergence remained controversial until the discovery of the "Lucy" fossils, in 1974, definitively dated in 1992 as between 3.22 and 3.18 million years.[19]
Wilson and another PhD studentMary-Claire King subsequently compared several lines of genetic evidence (immunology,amino acid differences, andprotein electrophoresis) on the divergence of humans and chimpanzees, and showed that all methods agreed that the two species were >99% similar.[4][20] Given the large organismal differences between the two species in the absence of large genetic differences, King and Wilson proposed that it was not structural gene differences that were responsible for species differences, butgene regulation of those differences, that is, the timing and manner in which near-identical gene products are assembled duringembryology anddevelopment. In combination with the "molecular clock" hypothesis, this contrasted sharply with the accepted view that larger or smaller organismal differences were due to large or smaller amounts of genetic divergence.
In the early 1980s, Wilson further disturbed and refined traditional anthropological thinking by his work with PhD students Rebecca Cann and Mark Stoneking on the so-called "Mitochondrial Eve" hypothesis.[21] In his efforts to identify informativegenetic markers for tracking human evolutionary history, he focused onmitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) –genes that are found inmitochondriaorganelles in thecytoplasm of thecell outside thenucleus. Because of its location in the cytoplasm, mtDNA is passed exclusively from mother to child, the father making no contribution, and in the absence ofgenetic recombination defines female lineages over evolutionary timescales. Because it alsomutates rapidly, it is possible to measure the small genetic differences among individual within species and between closely related species byrestriction endonucleasegene mapping. Wilson, Cann, and Stoneking measured differences among many individuals from different human continental groups, and found that humans from Africa showed the greatest inter-individual differences, consistent with an African origin of the human species (theRecent African origin of modern humans or "Out of Africa" hypothesis). The data further indicated that all living humans shared a common maternal ancestor, who lived in Africa only a few hundreds of thousands of years ago. This common ancestor became widely known in the media and popular culture as the Mitochondrial Eve. This had the unfortunate and erroneous implication that only a single female lived at that time, when in fact the occurrence of acoalescent ancestor is a necessary consequence ofpopulation genetic theory, and the Mitochondrial Eve would have been only one of many humans (male and female) alive at that time.[2][3] This finding was, like his earlier results, not readily accepted by anthropologists. The conventional hypothesis had been that various human continental groups had evolved from diverse ancestors, over several millions of years since divergence from chimpanzees. The mtDNA data, however, strongly support the alternative and now generally accepted hypothesis, that all humans descend relatively recently from a common, relatively small African population.[4][15]
Wilson became ill withleukaemia, and after abone marrow transplant, died on Sunday, 21 July 1991, at the Fred Hutchinson Memorial Cancer Research Center in Seattle. He had been scheduled to give the keynote address at an international conference the same day. He was 56, at the height of his scientific recognition and powers.[3][5][22] He was survived by his wife, Leona Wilson (died in 2009), and two children, Ruth (1961-2014), ofEast Lansing,Michigan, and David (born 1964), of San Francisco.[1][8]
Wilson's success can be attributed to his strong interest and depth of knowledge in biochemistry and evolutionary biology, his insistence of quantification of evolutionary phenomena, and his early recognition of new molecular techniques that could shed light on questions of evolutionary biology. After development of quantitative immunological methods, his lab was the first to recogniserestriction endonuclease mapping analysis as a quantitative evolutionary genetic method, which led to his early use ofDNA sequencing, and the then-nascent technique ofPCR to obtain large DNA sets for genetic analysis of populations. He trained scores of undergraduate, graduate (17 women and 17 men received their doctoral degrees in his lab), and post-doctoral students in molecularevolutionary biology, includingsabbatical visitors from six continents. His lab published more than 300 technical papers, and was recognised in the 1970s ~ 80s as the mecca for those wishing to enter the field ofmolecular evolution.[6]
The Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution was established in 2002 in his honour to advance knowledge of the evolution and ecology of New Zealand and Pacific plant and animal life, and human history in the Pacific. The Centre was under theMassey University, atPalmerston North, New Zealand, as a national collaboration among theUniversity of Auckland,Victoria University of Wellington, theUniversity of Otago,University of Canterbury, and theNew Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research.[23] The Centre closed at the end of 2015 when the Government stopped funding it.[24]
A 41-minute documentary film of his life entitledAllan Wilson, Evolutionary: Biochemist, Biologist, Giant of Molecular Biology was released by Films Media Group in 2008.[25]
Wilson introduced genome sequencing ofancient DNA to his post-doctoral scholar,Svante Pääbo, who carried on the research at theMax Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Pääbo became the sole recipient of theNobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2022 "for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution".[26][27]
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