Emile Zuckerkandl facts for kids

Émile Zuckerkandl (born July 4, 1922 – died November 9, 2013) was a French biologist who was born in Austria. He is known as one of the people who helped start the study of molecular evolution. With another scientist named Linus Pauling, he came up with the idea of the "molecular clock". This idea helped lead to the neutral theory of molecular evolution.

Early Life and Education

Émile Zuckerkandl grew up in Vienna, Austria. His family moved to Paris and then to Algiers in 1938. They had to leave Vienna to escape danger during World War II. After the war ended, he studied at the University of Paris.

Later, he moved to the United States to study physiology. He earned a master's degree in 1947 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Then he went back to the Sorbonne in Paris to get his Ph.D. in biology.

Discovering Molecular Biology

Zuckerkandl became very interested in how molecules work. His early research looked at how crabs shed their shells. He studied the roles of certain chemicals, like copper oxidases and hemocyanin, in this process. He did this research at a marine biology lab in Roscoff, France.

In 1957, Zuckerkandl met the famous chemist Linus Pauling. Pauling was becoming interested in how diseases affect molecules. He also studied how living things change over time at a molecular level. Zuckerkandl then moved back to the United States in 1959. He worked with Pauling at the California Institute of Technology.

The Molecular Clock Idea

Zuckerkandl's first project with Pauling involved studying hemoglobin. Hemoglobin is a protein found in red blood cells. They used new ways to identify proteins. These methods helped them see differences in protein structures.

They compared hemoglobin from different animals. They found that the more different the protein patterns were, the more distant the animals were in their family tree. This meant that changes in proteins could show how closely related species are.

How the Molecular Clock Works

In 1962, Pauling and Zuckerkandl published their first paper about the molecular clock. They noticed that differences in proteins seemed to build up at a steady rate. This was like a clock ticking over time. They used the number of differences in hemoglobin to guess how long ago species shared a common ancestor.

They checked their ideas using information from fossils. The results matched fairly well with what fossil records showed. This suggested that proteins could act like a clock for evolution.

Improving the Molecular Clock

Zuckerkandl worked to make the molecular clock idea better. In 1963, he and Pauling created the word "semantides". This term describes biological sequences like DNA, RNA, and proteins. They believed these sequences hold information about evolution. They thought the molecular clock method could be used for other semantides, not just proteins.

Other scientists also found that different proteins evolve at different speeds. For example, a protein called cytochrome c seemed to change faster than hemoglobin. Zuckerkandl used this information to improve the clock's math. He adjusted it to account for parts of a protein that change more slowly or quickly.

In 1964, Zuckerkandl and Pauling presented their most important paper. It was called "Evolutionary Divergence and Convergence in Proteins." This paper officially named the "evolutionary clock." It also explained the basic math behind it. This idea later became important for the neutral theory of molecular evolution. This theory suggests that many changes at the molecular level happen by chance, not just by natural selection.

Later Career and Contributions

In 1965, Zuckerkandl returned to France. He became the director of a research center in Montpellier. It was called the "Centre de Recherche de Biochimie Macromoléculaire."

In 1971, he became the first editor of the Journal of Molecular Evolution. This journal publishes new research on how molecules evolve. Later, he became the President of the Linus Pauling Institute. He also spoke out against ideas like social constructionism and intelligent design.