Emile Zuckerkandl
| Émile Zuckerkandl | |
|---|---|
| Born |
4 July 1922 Vienna, Austria |
| Died | 9 November 2013 (aged 91) Palo Alto, California |
| Residence | United States |
| Nationality | US |
| Fields | Molecular Biology |
| Known for | Molecular clock |
Émile Zuckerkandl (July 4, 1922 – November 9, 2013) was an Austrian-born French biologist considered one of the founders of the field of molecular evolution. He is best known for introducing, with Linus Pauling, the concept of the "molecular clock", which enabled the neutral theory of molecular evolution.
Zuckerkandl was raised in Vienna, Austria in a household of intellectuals, but his family relocated in 1938 to Paris, and later Algiers, to escape the racial policy of Nazi Germany with respect to Jews. At the end of World War II, he spent one year at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), then came to the United States to study physiology—earning a master's degree in 1947 from the University of Illinois, under C. Ladd Prosser—then returned to the Sorbonne to complete a Ph.D. in biology. Zuckerkandl developed a strong interest in molecular problems; his early research at a marine biology lab in Roscoff emphasized the roles of copper oxidases and hemocyanin in the molting cycles of crabs. In 1957, Zuckerkandl met renowned chemist Linus Pauling, who was becoming interested in molecular diseases and molecular evolution as an outgrowth of his activism on topics concerning nuclear power. They arranged a post-doctoral fellowship, and Zuckerkandl (now with his wife Jane) returned to the United States to work with Pauling at the California Institute of Technology beginning in 1959. He is an atheist.
Zuckerkandl's first project under Pauling (working with graduate student Richard T. Jones) was the application of new protein identification techniques—a combination of paper chromatography and electrophoresis that produced a two-dimensional pattern—to hemoglobin. The peptide fragments of hemoglobin samples from different species, partially broken apart by digestive enzymes, would produce unique patterns that could be used to estimate differences of protein structure. Zuckerkandl, Jones and Pauling published a comparison of several species' hemoglobin identification patterns in 1960, observing that the degree of dissimilarity of protein patterns corresponded approximately to the phylogenetic distance between source species. However, the method was not conducive to quantitative comparisons, so Zuckerkandl began working on the determination of the actual peptide sequence of the α and β chains of human and gorilla hemoglobin.
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