The Tangled Tree

by David Quammen

  Some people took Woese to be dour, but Gold saw a different person: lonely, eager for good company, sometimes raucous, always interested in new ideas, and generous of spirit. Gold had a local girlfriend in Schenectady but nowhere private to go with her; Woese let them park for trysts in his driveway. He’d come out and sweetly say good night to Larry and his girlfriend in the car. “I just was lucky,” Gold said, “and I stayed his friend forever.”

  Woese had a sort of bifurcated brain, Gold thought. On one side was his great depth of learning—acquired mostly by self-instruction, not formal training—and his relentless questioning. He was a biophysicist, Gold reminded me, not a biologist. “He didn’t know any biology. He knew less biology by the time he died than I know,” Gold said self-deprecatingly. “That’s a terrible thing to say. But he didn’t really think about biology. He was thinking about what happened three and a half billion years ago. That’s not biology.” It’s more a gumbo of physics and molecular evolution and geology, Gold meant. The RNA-world as pondered by a consummate autodidact.

  “The other part of him,” Gold said, the other side of that bifurcation, “was he wanted to be around people that enjoyed living.” For instance, Gold mentioned, two of Woese’s oldest and best friends: Norm Pace, with his motorcycles and his trapeze-artist wife, and Harry Noller, with his jazz music.

  So I went to see Harry Noller, now a professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and one of the world’s leading experts on ribosomes. I drove the steep switchback road up the wooded bluff above Monterey Bay, to where UCSC campus buildings sit cantilevered over small canyons, shaded by redwoods and eucalyptus, and found Noller in his cheerful little office. He wore a black sweatshirt, jeans, and gym shoes, and with his oval face ringed by white hair and a beard, his quiet calm, he came across like a priest or an oracle. But he was genial and straightforward, not oracular. On one bookshelf sat two copies of Ribosomes, a definitive tome of which he was coeditor, and a near-empty bottle of Laphroaig.

  He met Woese in the early 1970s, when Noller was a young assistant professor at UCSC, just beginning his own work on ribosomes. Noller’s interest was structure and function, not deep phylogeny, but he used methods similar to Woese’s, sequencing short stretches of ribosomal RNA, because he wanted to understand how those molecules contribute to function. Meanwhile he divided his time between the laboratory and playing jazz saxophone professionally, with various groups at a level sufficient to open for the Duke Ellington Orchestra. He shared a concert stage with vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson; he sat in with the great trumpeter Chet Baker. And then, after a rehearsal or a gig, he would dash back to see what his latest electrophoresis run had revealed. Noller became troubled by disparities between his ribosomal RNA sequences and some published by a lab in Strasbourg. He called Woese, whom he had met when Woese made a short visit to UCSC, and Woese reassured him that his data were correct, the French versions wrong. Woese even sounded angry when he said: “These sequences are sacred scrolls. They should be entrusted only to those who appreciate what they mean.”

  Woese admired Noller’s work, as it developed, and invited him to Urbana many times to give seminars or simply hang out and talk science. They collaborated on some papers. They drank a bit of scotch, sitting in the little study of Woese’s house, and listened to jazz. Occasionally they even played some music together, Woese on the home piano.

  “Was he a pretty good jazz pianist?” I asked.

  “Um . . . he was not incredible,” said Noller diplomatically. “He kind of noodled around at it, and he knew some tunes and . . .” There came a long, careful pause. “He was not an accomplished pianist, but he was fun to play with.” Woese was a serious listener to jazz, if not a talented player. He loved Art Tatum. He loved Ella Fitzgerald and Gerry Mulligan. He had a black house cat that he named Miles. In one of his letters to Noller, he added a postscript, typing carelessly: “Milt Jackson makes Lionel Hampton look lilke [sic] Quasimoto’s father.” To Woese’s credit, he recognized his limits—that he wasn’t a musician in Noller’s league—and for one visit, he surprised his friend by hiring a professional rhythm section, three guys, piano, bass, and drums, to play with Harry. They set up in the living room, and Woese invited some other friends over to share the fun. “I mean,” Noller told me, “talk about hospitality.”

  Woese offered loyalty as well as generosity. During one of Noller’s visiting seminars in Urbana, a professor from another department interrupted the question period to try to seize the room, which he claimed to have booked for that time slot—an intrusion that Woese considered “obstreperous, petty and insulting.” Afterward, Woese wrote the man a curt note informing him that he owed Professor Noller an apology. Then he sent Noller a copy, after inking it gleefully with his favorite rubber stamp, walloped crosswise onto the formal and scolding letter: MAY A BAND OF NOMADIC BARBERS GANG-LATHER YOUR SISTER.

  They talked often by phone, almost every day, even in the era of long-distance charges, before email, before fax. In the later years, Noller said, “I used to get calls from him in the middle of the night, after he’d had a few scotches, and he would go on and on.” These were not discussions of ribosomal RNA but ramblings about evolution, about the universe, sometimes featuring Delphic pronouncements. “Time is the residual of being.” “The ribosome teaches in silence.” He liked the story of one lesser musician’s reaction on listening to Art Tatum: “I hear it, but I don’t believe it.”

  During one of his visits to Santa Cruz, for a small celebration with Noller’s lab people, all the young students and postdocs, Woese happened across a plate of brownies in the kitchen. He ate four or five. One student noticed and, aware that these were that sort of brownies, alerted Dr. Noller with some alarm. Noller checked on Woese, Woese said don’t worry about it, and for the rest of the party, Woese sat harmlessly in a corner, intermittently exploding with laughter while tears ran down his face. He had dabbled with stronger drugs in the 1960s, by some accounts, but this evening seems to have been more benignly joyous. In the morning, while Noller made coffee, Woese pinched his brow and delivered another of his pronouncements: “Last night I discovered humor.”

  “He was complex,” Noller told me. “He was always a guru. He always saw himself as an unappreciated genius—or, underappreciated, unrecognized.” But never too serious for too long. “After making some heavy pronouncement,” Noller recalled, “he would then say something obscene.” A dirty joke, or a crude malediction on people he resented, such as the great founders of molecular biology, or Charles Darwin.

  At the end of his published remembrance of Woese, Noller wrote: “Carl was a profoundly creative and fiercely uncompromising scientist and thinker, who stood apart from the rest of his contemporaries.” Harry Noller is a subtle man, candid while loyal, and it’s easy to see that “stood apart” has two meanings. Woese was extraordinary and also, to many people, severe and remote.

  That’s why I found Charlie Vossbrinck’s testimony so interesting. I heard about Vossbrinck by chance, not at the Carl Woese memorial symposium where Gold and Noller and Norm Pace and Nigel Goldenfeld and George Fox and others assembled, and not through the eulogistic memoirs that appeared in Science, Nature, and other publications. When the journal RNA Biology devoted an entire issue to Woese, Vossbrinck wasn’t among the contributors. But he had met Woese, and they had gotten friendly back in the 1980s, when Vossbrinck was a PhD student in entomology, because the Entomology Department at the University of Illinois was just down the corridor from Woese’s lab. The third floor of Morrill Hall, again bringing people together. I went to see Charlie Vossbrinck in New Haven, at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, where he sat in another third-floor office, this one tiny, his walls decorated with posters of insects and spiders, his desk cluttered with gypsy moth caterpillars in small plastic cups. The gypsy moth is an economically significant pest, sometimes defoliating whole forests of oak and other trees, and these larvae in cups were being reared for study.
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br />   Vossbrinck is a big, openhearted bear of a man with a Long Island accent, his hair thinning, his jowls covered with gray stubble. He was sixty-three, he confided, and he shouldn’t have to be growing his own caterpillars, but his bosses didn’t appreciate his work and refused to promote him. Never mind. He pushed aside the frustrations, if not the caterpillars, and reminisced fondly for an hour about his friend Carl.

  They met because Vossbrinck heard about Woese’s work in molecular phylogeny, the RNA catalogs, and Vossbrinck wondered how that technique might apply to insects or the parasites they carry. Also, he needed work, because he was an impecunious grad student, and his teaching assistantship had ended. “So I went over there and talked to Carl, and Carl has kind of a bawdy sense of humor. I don’t know if you knew that.” Vossbrinck had told a lewd joke, which I won’t repeat, and Woese had laughed. “So we hit it off.” Woese hired him on a project, and they became friends.

  On a Friday afternoon, they would cross Goodwin Avenue to a place called Trino’s for beer, or Timpone’s, the Italian restaurant just beside it, Woese’s favorite getaway. After the beer, half drunk, they might go to a movie: Cheech and Chong, or something offbeat in science fiction. Another of Woese’s maxims, not quite so Delphic, was: “Beer opens the mind.” They also talked seriously, about evolution, among other things, and Vossbrinck saw Woese’s deep hunger to find “the big answer.” He also saw Woese’s ego. Vossbrinck himself became “kind of the moderator of his ego.” Charlie wouldn’t let Woese be too ponderous for too long.

  “One time we were in his backyard—because he would invite students over for barbecues and stuff, and we’d get drunk, and he would stand up and start to pronounce something, you know,” Vossbrinck told me. “And the first time I picked him up and I threw him in his bushes . . .”

  “You threw Carl Woese in his bushes?”

  “Yeah. And his wife and his kids would go, ‘Wow, he’s throwing Carl in the bushes.’ And Carl is going, ‘No, not in my bushes! In the neighbor’s bushes!’ ”

  Woese, full of beer and merriment, seems to have been more concerned about his hedge than his safety or dignity. His wife, Gay, evidently a woman of quiet resignation, seldom gets a speaking role or even a walk-on in the more public stories about Woese, but in this one, she was allowed to holler out. “Anyhow, I threw him in the bushes,” said Vossbrinck. The friendship only prospered.

  Occasionally they fermented their own champagne. They would buy cider from a local farm, Woese would get some champagne yeast from the Microbiology Department, and they’d let it bubble. “At the end of two weeks, it would be pee yellow, you know, and, a Friday afternoon, me and Carl would start drinking it.” The more they drank, the better their homemade concoction seemed. Woese would say something to the effect that “those people, those connoisseurs of wine, they would turn their noses at this. But this is really good stuff.” They coined a term for these happy states of inebriation: gooned up. “Let’s get gooned up, Carl,” Vossbrinck would say, and they did.

  Woese was generous, lending his friend Charlie some cash when needed, and attentive to others. He had a Chinese student in his lab at that time, a humble young man who wore a Mao jacket. It was Decheng Yang, the same PhD candidate who wound up as first author of the 1985 paper on mitochondrial origins. Realizing that Yang had almost no money, Woese paid him extra to teach them tai chi. The odd thing about that arrangement was that Yang didn’t know tai chi himself; he had to learn it in order to teach it. But there they were, on a courtyard outside Morrill Hall: a small, white-haired professor; a big, gentle bear; plus others from the Woese lab, and a Chinese student struggling to stay one lesson ahead of the class.

  Vossbrinck saw the ambitious and competitive side too. Each year, with the announcement of newly elected members of the National Academy of Sciences, and the name Carl Woese not among them, Woese would say, “My friends are letting me down.” One year he decided it was too late. If they ask now, Vossbrinck remembered him saying, “I’ll turn them down.” The following year, Vossbrinck heard he’d been elected. “You turned them down, right, Carl?” he teased.

  Woese smiled sheepishly. “You know me pretty well, don’t you.” He was glad to be in. He needed to be in.

  Yes, he felt underappreciated. He did such serious science, discovered the third form of life, became controversial, and throughout Vossbrinck’s days in Urbana, Woese was “still sweating it out.” He had no capacity for the gamesmanship, the career-building side of science—what Vossbrinck called “tap dancing.” That was costly to Woese. Vossbrinck himself, among his caterpillars, knew something about such costs. And then the Darwin business. “Carl had this hatred for Darwin,” Vossbrinck volunteered. It wasn’t easy to explain—abstract, philosophical, part of his ego? “Every once in a while, he’d say, ‘I’m more important than Darwin.’ ”

  I’ve heard that sort of thing from others, I said.

  “I would tell him I was going to throw him in the bushes.”

  At one point in those years, Vossbrinck acquired a fine, old-fashioned Linhof camera, 4 x 5–inch format, and asked Woese to sit for some portraits. They did a session around his house and yard. Vossbrinck showed me a selection on his computer. Woese in a flannel shirt, seated beside a hall table. The table lamp looks more comfortable than he does. Woese before a window, chiaroscuro, theatrically dreamy. Woese outside, in an aluminum lawn chair, squinting. Woese with head on fist, looking posed like a child. He didn’t seem to have the knack for being photographed. But then came one in which Woese sat forward, wild haired, bearded, deep-set eyes glaring fiercely into the lens, with the famous bushes nicely blurred behind him. God, I thought, it’s the best Woese image I’ve ever seen. So that’s who he was. But who was that?

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  Among the biggest mysteries at issue when Woese died, and still at issue today, is the origins of the eukaryotic cell. That is to say, the deepest beginnings of us, among others. If there are three domains of life, as Woese proclaimed in 1977, and one of those domains is Eukarya, encompassing all animals, all plants, all fungi, and all microbial beings whose cells contain nuclei, then what is the foundational story of that lineage, leading eventually to humans and every other creature we can see? What made eukaryotes so different? What set them onto such a divergent course, away from the tiny size and relative simplicity of Bacteria and Archaea, toward bigness and complexity, redwoods and blue whales and white rhinos, not to mention humans and all our peculiar contributions to the planet, including major league baseball, iambic pentameter, and Gregorian chant? What were the pieces, and what were the processes, that came together to form the first eukaryotic cell?

  Whatever happened that was so momentous, it probably happened between 1.6 billion and 2.1 billion years ago. The size of that window—a half billion years—reflects the current degree of scientific uncertainty. Several hypotheses exist, offered by bitterly divided camps. Fossil evidence in rocks, of early microbial forms, doesn’t shed much light. Far better clues, precise and various, are mined from genomic sequence data. Some of those clues still come from 16S rRNA. That’s thanks to the insight of Carl Woese and four decades of work in his footsteps. But the meaning of those data is variously construed. All the experts agree nowadays that endosymbiosis played an essential role: somehow a bacterium got captured and domesticated inside another cell, a host, where it became a mitochondrion. Once present and abundant within early eukaryotic cells, mitochondria delivered vast quantities of energy, far beyond anything previously available, allowing increases in size and complexity among these new cells and the multicellular creatures that evolved from them. A salient feature of the increased complexity was containment—in particular, containment of genetic material. More specifically, that meant packaging most of each cell’s DNA within an internal organelle: a nucleus, bounded by a membrane. So the mystery of eukaryotic origins encompasses three main questions. (1) What was the original host cell? (2) Did mitochondria acquisition trigger the most crucial changes—or
, alternatively, did it result from them? (3) From what sources did the nucleus arise? A simpler way of asking all that: How did one thing get inside another thing to form a complex thingamajig, and what were the things?

  New evidence regarding the first two of those three questions has lately arrived from an unexpected locale: the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. It came up in marine sediments scooped from an area, almost eight thousand feet deep, between Greenland and Norway, near a field of hydrothermal vents known as Loki’s Castle. Loki is a shape-shifting, devious god of Norse mythology; the Norwegian-led discovery team gave the vent field that name because the mineralized vent chimneys looked like a castle, and because the place was so hard to find. The marine sediments, shared with other scientists for analysis, contained DNA that revealed an entirely new lineage of archaea, a genome so different from anything known that it seemed to represent a distinct phylum. (Phyla are big divisions; all vertebrate animals, for instance, belong to a single phylum.) The biologist leading the genomic investigation, a young Dutchman named Thijs Ettema, based at a university in Sweden, named the new group Lokiarchaeota, after the deep castle and the devious god.

  What made this find widely newsworthy, when Ettema’s team published in 2015, was that the Lokiarchaeota genome seems such a near match to what must have been the host cell at the origin of our own lineage. One headline, in the Washington Post, said: “Newly Discovered ‘Missing Link’ Shows How Humans Could Evolve from Single-Celled Organisms.” Were these archaea, pulled from the deep marine ooze, modern cousins of the creature that, two billion years ago, took a drastic divergence from its own lineage and became eukaryotic? Were they our closest microbial relatives? Maybe. That caught public attention.