Woese was a theist, not an atheist like many other scientists. “He said he believed in a deity,” Debbie Piper told me. She is an atheist herself, with no reason to romanticize his beliefs, like the pious liars who fabricated a deathbed reversion to Anglicanism for Charles Darwin. Woese made no deathbed lurch toward organized religion. He was steady, though vague. There was a deity. Sometimes in an email, he would say to Piper: “May the God you don’t believe in bless you.” She laughed, telling me that, as though it had been a sweet joke between them.
On July 4, 2012, arriving in Boston, she found him in bad shape, not just medically but also mentally. Stuck in Massachusetts General Hospital, surrounded by family, he was very unhappy with his treatment. He wanted out. “They were giving him Haldol, and it was just making him crazy,” Piper told me. Haldol, trade name for a drug called haloperidol, is an antipsychotic medication used to treat schizophrenia, delirium, psychosis, and other forms of agitation. Had Woese become psychotic? No. Was he agitated? Yes indeed. He had torn the IV tube out of his arm. His wife and two children were concerned but cautious, disinclined to challenge medical authority. Piper felt no such constraint. “Why are you giving him Haldol?” she asked the doctor who seemed to be in charge.
“Well, because he was upset.”
“He’s upset because you’re giving him Haldol. He wants his mind to be clear.”
Woese hated the fogginess, she told me. He wanted to be able to think. There was nothing—no medical fate, no waves of pain—worse to him than deprivation of his ability to think. That was his life. So the doctor took him off Haldol, and then Woese refused even Tylenol, despite the major surgery he had just undergone. They had cut open his belly, rearranged his gut, a day or two earlier. But he wanted clarity more than he wanted comfort.
“When we got that all straightened out,” Piper told me, “then he asked me if I would help him die with dignity.” She paused. “Which I did.”
The doctor recommended he stay in Mass General for three weeks. Woese didn’t want that. He declined chemotherapy. Piper helped get him aboard a medical charter flight, costing $16,000, and back to Urbana. “They rolled him into the house,” she said, and he was home.
Home but not done, not quite. People wanted to see him and hear from him. Piper helped him dissuade most such well-wishers, campus dignitaries, and others with no vital claim on the last of his energies and his privacy. Although his relationships with his wife and his son and his daughter had been attenuated, he wanted them close to him now. Few others. Piper brought food, which sometimes he could eat. Larry Gold visited. Nigel Goldenfeld made himself helpful. In August Woese consented to endure a series of video interviews for the historical record. Jan Sapp came to town for that purpose, Norman Pace also, and Woese did his best to respond to gingerly questioning, mainly by Sapp and Goldenfeld, eliciting reflections on his work, his discoveries, the science of his time.
These recordings would be archived at the IGB. (The IGB itself would later be renamed, becoming the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology.) Pale and manifestly uncomfortable, seated before bookshelves and an ivy plant, he spoke to the camera for more than six hours spread across two days, laboring to remember facts and names, to express ideas, frustrated when he was unable, often saying “Cut” or “Hold” when he couldn’t summon a focused response. The camera operator didn’t cut. Woese seemed unaware of that, or unconcerned, and, in a moment, he would start again. There was so much that still needed saying. Now it was too late. He took long pauses. He blinked back his own mortality. At one point he said, “My memory serves badly, badly, badly.” Meanwhile the camera captured it all. At the time of his memorial service, months afterward, someone raised the idea of playing some of this video to bring his voice and image into the event.
Debbie Piper, when we spoke, recalled her reaction to that thought: “Oh, please don’t. Because he just looks and sounds like a sick old man.”
But inside the sick old man was a multiplicity of other realities. Some had arisen straight and some had arrived sideways.
Acknowledgments
This project began with my reading of the work of Ford Doolittle, particularly his 1999 paper in Science, which I discovered belatedly in 2013. Doolittle’s writings led me in several directions—most importantly, to the work of Carl Woese, who had died on December 30, 2012. From those leads, the broader subject of molecular phylogenetics and the radical rethinking of the idea of the tree of life opened out to me like a vast limestone cavern, filled with astonishing Neolithic rock art and lit suddenly by flashlight. My first active step was to make contact with Doolittle, and, from the beginning, he has been extraordinarily helpful and generous to this project, without ever trying to influence unduly its shape or direction. He sat for days of interviews on several different occasions, in Halifax and elsewhere, and he read the entire book in draft, offering corrections toward greater accuracy, again without trying to lobby my subjective judgments or conclusions. Thanks, Ford.
The historian Jan Sapp has also helped me in several ways: through his published work, most notably his superb book The New Foundations of Evolution; by sitting for interviews at great length; and by sharing with me not only his memories of Carl Woese and of Lynn Margulis (both of whom he knew well) but also some private email correspondence. Although we write for very different audiences, and in very different ways, Sapp was always generously supportive and candid when I called on him for insight or clarification.
Two scientists, both outside the field of molecular phylogenetics but keenly familiar with the pageant of biology, and both personal friends of mine, read the entire book in draft and offered advice: Mike Gilpin (my faithful consulting biologist since The Song of the Dodo) and Dave Sands.
Another group of people did me double favors: sitting for extended interviews, or answering email and phone questioning over the years, then afterward reading short portions of the draft book for accuracy, giving me notes and crucial corrections: Linda Bonen, Jim Brown, Julie Dunning Hotopp, Thijs Ettema, Cedric Feschotte, George Fox, Larry Gold, Peter Gogarten, Nigel Goldenfeld, Mike Gray, Jonathan Gressel, Thierry Heidmann, Jim Lake, Jeffrey Lawrence, Stuart Levy, Harris Lewin, Ken Luehrsen, Bill Martin, Harry Noller, Norman Pace, Debbie Piper, Julie Russell, Dorion Sagan, Mitch Sogin, Jake Turnbull, Charlie Vossbrinck, Blake Wiedenheft, and Ralph Wolfe. George Fox also shared with me the sequence of working drafts of the 1980 “Big Tree” paper he coauthored with Woese and others.
Among the many scientists who indulged my intrusive curiosity, I want to thank four in particular, because these men gave so generously of their time, their thinking, and their patience, and yet purely for reasons of structure and focus, their work is mentioned little or not at all in this book: John McCutcheon, Gary Olsen, Jonathan Eisen, and Eugene Koonin. I spent ten days in Chile with John McCutcheon and his colleagues, for instance, shadowing fieldwork (that is, chasing cicadas with butterfly nets) led by his postdoc Piotr Łukasik toward a study of bacterial endosymbiont genomes within these particular cicadas. That work was part of the overall focus of McCutcheon’s lab: nested genomes and gene transfer within endosymbionts of certain insects, and what such nesting and genome reduction may suggest about endosymbiosis generally—perhaps even about the endosymbiotic origin of mitochondria. Although McCutcheon’s work is deeply fascinating and important, I found that its relationship to my subject was just too complicated for me to ask readers to follow me where I had tried to follow him. Too bad: Chile is picturesque. And McCutcheon’s company and conversation were wonderful, as were the Chilean steaks and beers.
Likewise, I spent a week in Davis, California, auditing an introductory biology class taught by Jonathan Eisen—in a large lecture hall, to hundreds of students—under the title “Biodiversity and the Tree of Life.” After the classes each day, Eisen and I talked about phylogenetics and evolution and baseball and books, and then, on my final day, he took me birding at his favorite protected wetlands nearby. Look, he said at one moment,
there’s a white-faced ibis! So I had reassurance that this biologist, whose lab website bears the slogan “All microbes, all the time,” cares about macrofauna too. Gary Olsen, among the closest working partners of Carl Woese during their shared years in Urbana, walked me patiently through ideas and memories that similarly never made it into the book. Eugene Koonin’s wide-ranging thoughts on microbial genomes and evolution intrigued me so much that, after a first interview at his office in Bethesda, I said I’d like to read his book The Logic of Chance and return for a second session. I did, months later, and though I don’t portray either visit in this book, those conversations with Koonin were among the great ancillary privileges of doing the whole project.
The list of others who helped my research, welcomed my visits to their labs and their offices, and responded hospitably to my pestiferous questioning is much longer and best organized geographically. I will repeat a few names to put them in this context. In the United States and Canada: Eric Alm, John Archibald, Jillian Banfield, Linda Bonen, Austin Booth, Seth Bordenstein, Jim Brown, Tyler Brunet, Ford Doolittle, Laura Eme, Mark Ereshefsky, Cedric Feschotte, Greg Fournier, George Fox, Bob Gallo, Peter Gogarten, Larry Gold, Nigel Goldenfeld, Mike Gray, Jacob P. Johnson, Patrick Keeling, Jim Lake, Jeffrey Lawrence, Harris Lewin, Stuart Levy, Linda Magrum, Joanne Manaster, Carlos Mariscal, Harry Noller, Maureen O’Malley, Norman Pace, Debbie Piper, David Relman, Andrew Roger, Mitch Sogin, Ray Timpone, Charlie Vossbrinck, Blake Wiedenheft, and Ralph Wolfe. In England: Tom Cavalier-Smith, Matthew Cobb, Martin Embley, James McInerney, plus many people at the National Institute for Biological Standards and Controls, and the National Collection of Type Cultures, including Isobel Atkin, Miles Carroll, Ana Deheer-Graham, Steve Grigsby, Ayuen Lual, Hannah McGregor, Jodie Roberts, Jane Shallcross, and, again, Julie Russell and Jake Turnbull. In Germany: Christa Schleper and, of course, Bill Martin. In France: Thierry Heidmann. In Israel: Jonathan Gressel. In Sweden: Thijs Ettema. In Chile: Piotr Lukasik and Claudio Veloso as well as John McCutcheon.
In Champaign-Urbana, at the University of Illinois, I was welcomed and helped by Christopher Prom and his colleagues, especially John Franch, at the university archives. At the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, Director Gene Robinson and his assistant Kim Johnson arranged access for me to events, contacts, and materials. And through such an event at the institute—a memorial symposium—I met Donna Daniels, Carl Woese’s younger sister. Mrs. Daniels later answered a list of my questions by email and graciously shared memories of her beloved brother and their family history. Gabriella Woese and Robert Woese, Carl Woese’s widow and his son, kindly allowed me to quote from his unpublished writings.
Colleagues are important for writers too. I’ll mention just four whose works, knowledge, and friendship specifically helped me in this effort: Carl Zimmer, Ed Yong, Dorion Sagan, and Barry Lopez.
Bob Bender, at Simon & Schuster, gave the book a wonderfully astute and valuable edit—the old-fashioned kind, guiding the author to make his meaning more clear, his pacing more steady, and his relationship to the reader more friendly. To Bob and his colleagues, from Jonathan Karp to Johanna Li, I’m very grateful for vital and genial collaboration. Philip Bashe did a keen copyedit.
Amanda Urban, my agent at ICM, played an enormous role by way of advocacy and counsel, again, in helping me choose the right project and find the right place.
Emily Krieger has again served as my chief defender against error of my own making, as she fact-checked this book with tireless rigor. Gloria Thiede has again—thirty years now—transcribed long recordings of arcane, mumbled conversation into pages a writer can dice and use, and, at risk of strabismus, she has typed the bibliography. Together these two women have saved me from working even slower and appearing more foolish than I do.
At home in Montana, my wife, Betsy, remains my first advisor, my most trusted sounding board, my exemplar of strength and love. She’s also matriarch of our adopted brood of other mammals. Harry and Nick and Stella, old canine souls, saw the beginning of this project but not its end. Steve and Manny, youngsters, now chew the shoes. Oscar the cat abides.
"One of the most fascinating and though-provoking writers of natural history." —The Seattle Times
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About the Author
PHOTOGRAPH BY LYNN DONALDSON
DAVID QUAMMEN’S fifteen books include The Song of the Dodo, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, and Spillover, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award. He has written for Harper’s, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Book Review, Outside, and Powder, among other magazines, and is a contributing writer for National Geographic. He wrote the entire text of the May 2016 issue of National Geographic on the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem—the first time in the history of the magazine that an issue was single-authored. Quammen shares a home in Bozeman, Montana, with his wife, Betsy Gaines Quammen, an environmental historian, along with two Russian wolfhounds and a cross-eyed cat.
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NONFICTION
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Monster of God
The Song of the Dodo
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Natural Acts
The Boilerplate Rhino
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The Flight of the Iguana
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Blood Line
The Soul of Viktor Tronko
The Zolta Configuration
To Walk the Line
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Notes
This book contains a Montana blizzard of facts, and though all of them are keyed to sources in my private annotated draft, I won’t burden readers, or the printer, with full citations of every one here. Anyone fervently compelled to know the provenance of a particular assertion is welcome to contact me through my website, www.davidquammen.com. The notes following here pertain only to the most crucial sourcing: for quotations from published works or archival sources. Spoken quotes, from my interviews, are set in their contexts within the text. Complete citations are supplied in the bibliography. In cases where a source is quoted several times within a single paragraph of the text, I’ve noted that source only once, confident that the especially curious reader will be able to find the full passages easily.
THREE SURPRISES: An Introduction
“a separate form of life”: New York Times, November 3, 1977.
PART I: Darwin’s Little Sketch
“have arisen from one living filament”: quoted in Browne (1995), 84.<
br />
“Why is life short”: Barrett (1987), 171–76.
“organized beings represent a tree”: ibid., 176.
The tree is “irregularly branched”: ibid., 176–77.
“proceeds” from lifeless things: Archibald (2014), 2, guided me to this passage from Aristotle.
Ladder of Ascent and Descent of the Intellect: Pietsch (2012), 4–6.
“Scale of Natural Beings”: Archibald (2014), fig. 1.4.
“very wee animals”: Lane (2015), 4.
“a figure like a genealogical tree”: Stevens (1983), 206.
“according to the order that Nature appears”: ibid., 203.
That is, a “natural order”: ibid., 205.
“It appears, and one can hardly doubt it”: ibid., 206.
classified animals as “bloodless” and “blooded”: Mayr (1982), 152.
“Stamen number is a striking character”: Stevens (1983), 205.
“This figure, which I call a botanical tree”: ibid., 206.
an American who prided himself a “Christian geologist”: Lawrence (1972), 21, 23.
“of insects, of worms, and microscopic animals”: Packard (1901), 37.
rather quickly “forgotten and unknown”: ibid., 56–57.
He argued that “subtle fluids”: Mayr (1982), 354.
“the true order of gradation” . . . a “counterpart” arrangement: Pietsch (2012), 36–37.
called his illustration a “Paleontological Chart”: ibid., 81.
“nothing was before me but a life”: Hitchcock (1863), 282.
The Tangled Tree Page 40
