Читать книгу The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life - David Quammen, David Quammen - Страница 33

Wondering how that announcement was greeted by the scientific community at the time, I had put the question to Ralph Wolfe, several months before the pizza with George Fox.

“It was a disaster,” Wolfe said mildly. Then he explained, with the sympathy of friendship, why Woese’s declaration of a third kingdom—the substance of the claim, and the manner in which Woese made it—had sounded discordantly to many of their peers. The crux of the problem was a press release.

Woese’s lab had been supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the latter under its exobiology program (devoted to extraterrestrial biology, in case there is any), presumably because grant administrators felt that his research on early evolution might help illuminate the question of life on other planets. As the first PNAS paper in the methanogens-aren’t-bacteria series moved toward publication, Woese acceded to a suggestion from the federal agencies and allowed a public announcement of his findings from Washington, rather than just letting the article drop in the journal’s November issue and speak for itself—which was how science, in those days, was customarily done. Ralph Wolfe knew nothing about this, despite his close connection with the work, until one day when a mutual acquaintance let slip that the press release would appear tomorrow. “What press release?” Wolfe asked.

The cat was out. It was an indelicate situation. “A few minutes later,” Wolfe told me, “Carl was in my office, explaining.”

Wolfe showed no dudgeon as he recounted this. The human comedy is various, not always funny; Woese’s lapse was just a miscommunication between friends, a misstep by a colleague he held in high regard. To understand what went wrong, you had to consider an insult Woese had suffered years earlier, a hurt he had carried long afterward. “He presented a paper in Paris,” Wolfe said. It was on the ratchet model, the same clever but incorrect idea that later caught George Fox’s interest. Woese had conceived this brainstorm—a conceptual construct for how ribosomes work in manufacturing proteins—and called it a Reciprocating Ratchet Mechanism, by which RNA cranks through the ribosome structure, adding amino acids to the protein chain, a notch forward, and then a reload, and then another notch forward, but never a notch back.

“He didn’t present any evidence for it,” Wolfe said. “He just presented this as a concept.” The audience at the Paris meeting may have included luminaries such as Jacques Monod, François Jacob, and Francis Crick, whom he knew a bit better than the others. “It was the last paper before lunch,” Wolfe said, “and nobody asked any questions. They all got up, and left, and went to lunch. And this hurt Carl. It was almost a mortal wound. He was just so offended by the behavior of these scientists. He told me that ‘I resolve next time they will not ignore me.’ And so this was the rationale behind his press release.”

The press release went out from Washington, presumably with an embargo to the date of journal publication. On November 2, 1977, the third kingdom became an open topic for all comers. The following day, based on that alert and three hours with Woese in his office, a reporter for the Times told the story on page 1, beneath the photo I’ve already mentioned—of Woese with his Adidas on a messy desk—and a headline emphasizing the ancientness theme: “Scientists Discover a Form of Life That Predates Higher Organisms.” The article, by a veteran Times man named Richard D. Lyons, began:

Scientists studying the evolution of primitive organisms reported today the existence of a separate form of life that is hard to find in nature. They described it as a “third kingdom” of living material, composed of ancestral cells that abhor oxygen, digest carbon dioxide and produce methane.

That was relatively accurate compared with coverage in some other news outlets. The Washington Post did less well than the Times, reporting that Woese claimed to have found the “first form of life on earth,” which suggested that a dawn organism, the very earliest living creature, self-assembled somehow about four billion years ago, had survived to occupy sewage in twentieth-century Urbana. Wrong. The Chicago Tribune was worse still, proposing that Methanobacterium thermoautotrophicum (misspelled) had left no fossil record because it “evolved and went into hiding” at a time before rocks had yet formed. Which rocks? “Utter nonsense,” Wolfe said. The Tribune story even carried a dizzy headline asserting “Martianlike Bugs May Be Oldest Life.” And from there the coverage spooled outward, via United Press International and other echo chambers, to small-town papers such as the Lebanon Daily News in Pennsylvania, under similar headlines tooting about “Oldest Life Form” rather than the distinctness between methanogens and all (“typical”) bacteria. At very least, the stories bruiting “Oldest Life Form” were missing an essential point presented by Woese and Fox. A headline about “Weirdest Life Form” might have captured that better.

The problem, according to Ralph Wolfe, was not just announcing scientific results by press release but also that Carl Woese himself lacked facility as a verbal explainer. He had never developed the skills to give a good lecture. He stood before audiences—when he did so at all, which wasn’t often—and thought deeply, groped for words, and started and stopped, generally failing to inspire or persuade. Then suddenly that November of 1977, for a very few days, he had the world’s attention.

“When reporters called him up and tried to find out what this was all about,” Wolfe told me, “he couldn’t communicate with them. Because they didn’t understand his vocabulary. Finally, he said, ‘This is a third form of life.’ Well, wow! Rockets took off, and they wrote the most unscientific nonsense you can imagine.” The press-release approach backfired, the popular news accounts overshadowed the careful PNAS paper, and many scientists who didn’t know Woese concluded, according to Wolfe, that “he was a nut.”

Wolfe himself heard from colleagues immediately. Among his phone calls on the morning of November 3, 1977, “the most civil and free of four-letter words” was from Salvador Luria, one of the early giants of molecular biology, a Nobel Prize winner in 1969 and a professor there at Illinois during Wolfe’s earlier years, who called now from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), saying: “Ralph, you must dissociate yourself from this nonsense, or you’re going to ruin your career.” Luria had seen the newspaper coverage but not yet read the PNAS article, with the supporting data, to which Wolfe referred him. He never called back. But the broader damage was done. After Luria’s call and others, Wolfe recollected in his memoir, “I wanted to crawl under something and hide.”

To me, he added: “We had a whole bunch of calls, all negative, people outraged at this nonsense. The scientific community just totally rejected the thing. As a result, this whole concept was set back by at least a decade or fifteen years.” Wolfe himself felt badly burned by the events, his professional reputation in peril. There arose a wall of resistance—cast up by visceral objection to science by press release—against recognizing the archaea as a separate form of life. “Of course, Carl was very bitter all through the eighties and well into the nineties,” Wolfe said. “He was bitter that the scientific community rejected his third form. His phylogeny and taxonomy.” As it had been for Stanier and van Niel, and still earlier for Ferdinand Cohn, bacterial taxonomy was a hot issue again. This time the evidence was molecular, and the deeper story was of evolution on its broadest scale.