Endosymbiotic Theories of Organelles Revisited by Naoki Sato

Author:Naoki Sato
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811511615
Publisher: Springer Singapore

5.9.4 Young, Feminine Researcher Embodying Scientific Advances

Nevertheless, Margulis’ proposal was strong enough to move many important scientists of the time. Many principal microbiologists of the time, such as Roger Stanier, acted in support of her hypothesis, maybe because her proposal was rooted in her exceptional knowledge on Earth science, fossil records, and origin of life that was obtained from top-level scientists.

The most famous and perhaps the first young, feminine scientist was Marie Curie (1867–1934). Coming from Poland to Paris, she married a physicist Pierre who performed less conspicuous study. With his help, she worked very hard for her Ph.D. study, purifying minute amounts of polonium and radium from hundreds of kilograms of rocks, and obtained the first evidence for radioactivity (Curie 1899). At the time around 1900, women had difficulty in pursuing research, but fortunately she had some kind supporters who arranged two Nobel Prizes, one with discovery of radioactivity and the other with discovery of radium. Marie put forward a curious hypothesis including radioactive decay of heavy metal, reminiscent of alchemy, but Rutherford presented rapidly a decisive demonstration of her hypothesis. Therefore, in the case of physics revolution in the 1900s, many technical advances simultaneously and cooperatively worked for new discoveries.

In the 1970s, on the other hand, biological revolution was driven by the advances in molecular biology. As represented by the famous painting of Delacroix “La Liberté guidant le peuple” (Liberty leading the people), woman is the symbol of a revolution. In this sense, no one doubted that a woman researcher like Jeanne d’Arc (a girl leading the French army to win England at the end of the Hundred Years’ War in the fifteenth century) appeared in the biological revolution. In fact, Linda Bonen (Professor in Ottawa University) and Margaret Dayhoff (1925–1983) performed molecular phylogeny suggesting endosymbiotic origin of chloroplasts. Ursula Goodenough (Professor in Washington University), who wrote a commentary on the endosymbiotic theory in 1970, became a leader of Chlamydomonas genetics. Ruth Sager, a rival of Lynn Margulis at the time, isolated and characterized chloroplast DNA of Chlamydomonas. The “success” of Lynn Margulis was a part of these leading works by feminine biologists.

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