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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
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| Allan Wilson (biologist) | 2/2 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Wilson_(biologist) | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T17:03:48.044183+00:00 | kb-cron |
In the early 1980s, Wilson further disturbed and refined traditional anthropological thinking by his work with PhD students Rebecca Cann and Mark Stoneking on the so-called "Mitochondrial Eve" hypothesis. In his efforts to identify informative genetic markers for tracking human evolutionary history, he focused on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) – genes that are found in mitochondria organelles in the cytoplasm of the cell outside the nucleus. Because of its location in the cytoplasm, mtDNA is passed exclusively from mother to child, the father making no contribution, and in the absence of genetic recombination defines female lineages over evolutionary timescales. Because it also mutates rapidly, it is possible to measure the small genetic differences among individual within species and between closely related species by restriction endonuclease gene mapping. Wilson, Cann, and Stoneking measured differences among many individuals from different human continental groups, and found that humans from Africa showed the greatest inter-individual differences, consistent with an African origin of the human species (the Recent African origin of modern humans or "Out of Africa" hypothesis). The data further indicated that all living humans shared a common maternal ancestor, who lived in Africa only a few hundreds of thousands of years ago. This common ancestor became widely known in the media and popular culture as the Mitochondrial Eve. This had the unfortunate and erroneous implication that only a single female lived at that time, when in fact the occurrence of a coalescent ancestor is a necessary consequence of population genetic theory, and the Mitochondrial Eve would have been only one of many humans (male and female) alive at that time. This finding was, like his earlier results, not readily accepted by anthropologists. The conventional hypothesis had been that various human continental groups had evolved from diverse ancestors, over several millions of years since divergence from chimpanzees. The mtDNA data, however, strongly support the alternative and now generally accepted hypothesis, that all humans descend relatively recently from a common, relatively small African population.
== Death and legacy == Wilson became ill with leukaemia, and after a bone marrow transplant, died on Sunday, 21 July 1991, at the Fred Hutchinson Memorial Cancer Research Center in Seattle. He had been scheduled to give the keynote address at an international conference the same day. He was 56, at the height of his scientific recognition and powers. He was survived by his wife, Leona Wilson (died in 2009), and two children, Ruth (1961-2014), of East Lansing, Michigan, and David (born 1964), of San Francisco. Wilson's success can be attributed to his strong interest and depth of knowledge in biochemistry and evolutionary biology, his insistence of quantification of evolutionary phenomena, and his early recognition of new molecular techniques that could shed light on questions of evolutionary biology. After development of quantitative immunological methods, his lab was the first to recognise restriction endonuclease mapping analysis as a quantitative evolutionary genetic method, which led to his early use of DNA sequencing, and the then-nascent technique of PCR to obtain large DNA sets for genetic analysis of populations. He trained scores of undergraduate, graduate (17 women and 17 men received their doctoral degrees in his lab), and post-doctoral students in molecular evolutionary biology, including sabbatical visitors from six continents. His lab published more than 300 technical papers, and was recognised in the 1970s ~ 80s as the mecca for those wishing to enter the field of molecular evolution. The Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution was established in 2002 in his honour to advance knowledge of the evolution and ecology of New Zealand and Pacific plant and animal life, and human history in the Pacific. The Centre was under the Massey University, at Palmerston North, New Zealand, as a national collaboration among the University of Auckland, Victoria University of Wellington, the University of Otago, University of Canterbury, and the New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research. The Centre closed at the end of 2015 when the Government stopped funding it. A 41-minute documentary film of his life entitled Allan Wilson, Evolutionary: Biochemist, Biologist, Giant of Molecular Biology was released by Films Media Group in 2008. Wilson introduced genome sequencing of ancient DNA to his post-doctoral scholar, Svante Pääbo, who carried on the research at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Pääbo became the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2022 "for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution".
=== Awards and honours === MacArthur Fellow in 1986 Guggenheim Fellow in 1972 3M Life Sciences Award from the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in 1991 Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1988 Member of the Human Genome Organization Associate editor of the Journal of Molecular Evolution
== References ==
== External links == Profile at Omnilexica Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution Allan Wilson: Evolutionary, Film, 2008 (Documentary), George Andrews Productions Background on Allan Wilson Work on human evolution Allan Charles Wilson, Biochemistry; Molecular Biology: Berkeley, by Bruce N. Ames, Thomas H. Jukes, Vincent M. Sarich, David B. Wake in University of California: In Memoriam, 1991 Guide to the Allan Wilson Papers at The Bancroft Library