Carl R. Woese, a University microbiology and Institute of Genomic Biology professor of 48 years, died Dec. 30 in his Urbana home at the age of 84. He is renowned for his discovery of archaea, the third branch of life, described in two papers he wrote with colleagues in 1977. 

In his faculty profile for the school of molecular and cellular biology, Woese wrote, “I am a molecular biologist turned evolutionist.”

Woese has been celebrated as one of the greatest evolutionary biologists of the last century for finding this third branch, beyond the previously accepted two: bacteria and eukaryotes.

“It is truly impossible to adequately describe or to categorize his contributions to the University of Illinois, to biology and to the world during his long and distinguished career here,” Chancellor Phyllis Wise said in a statement. “The campus community has lost one of our giants this week.”

Woese discovered archaea by determining the molecular sequence of parts of the ribosome, which are similar to bar codes but for organisms.

“Woese mapped out the evolutionary history of all life,” said Nigel Goldenfeld, a physics professor and colleague of Woese’s. “He showed that all life is related and descended from a single organism or perhaps community, known as the last universal common ancestor.”

That ancestor existed around 3.5 billion years ago. Woese and his colleagues concluded life began and evolved similar to modern cells, but the ancestor evolved in less than 1 billion years. 

“How this happened is still not fully understood,” Goldenfeld said. “Carl Woese and I showed that to explain the known properties of the genetic code, life had to have evolved in a fundamentally different way from what people think as ‘Darwinian evolution.’”

This mode of evolution is communal, and it still occurs in modern bacteria. 

“The work was incredibly painstaking and detailed, but Woese believed in what he was doing and so persevered in isolation for 10 years or more,” Goldenfeld said.

His isolation wasn’t always by choice, either.

“Woese encountered huge opposition to his ideas from the orthodox scientific establishment, in part because he was the consummate outsider,” Goldenfeld said.

When he first introduced his discovery, there was skepticism because he was overturning the accepted wisdom of two domains of life, said Gene Robinson, director of the Institute for Genomic Biology.

“He was intense, unpretentious and totally passionate about science,” Robinson said. “He was especially interested in encouraging students and young scientists.”

Woese continued his work even during the last few months of his life.

“He was very ill but wanted to talk science as much as he possibly could,” Goldenfeld said. “He and I were trying to understand the unpredictable nature of the evolutionary process and how novelty is generated.”

Woese is survived by his wife, Gabriella; his son, Robert; and his daughter, Gabriella. A memorial for will be held at 3 p.m. on Jan. 26 at the Levis Faculty Center. 

Jacqueline can be reached at [email protected].