Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [83]
According to Margulis, however, the most important variation that is passed on through the generations is what happens when plant and animal cells play host to microbial genes. This, she says, is the origin of complex life:
It may have started when one sort of squirming bacterium invaded another – seeking food, of course. But certain invasions evolved into truces; associations once ferocious became benign. When swimming bacterial would-be invaders took up residence inside their sluggish hosts, this joining of forces created a new whole that was, in effect, far greater than the sum of its parts: faster swimmers capable of moving large numbers of genes evolved. Some of these newcomers were uniquely competent in the evolutionary struggle. Further bacterial associations were added on, as the modern cell evolved.
We now know, from the fossil record, that Margulis is right. There is plenty of evidence that such things went on all those millions of years ago. That is why, to use Dawkins’ words, endosymbiosis has gone ‘from being an unorthodoxy to an orthodoxy’.
It was the most difficult of journeys, however. The original paper containing this revolutionary idea was rejected fifteen times before it was finally published. Even on publication, those who didn’t ridicule the idea ignored it or dismissed it as unimportant.
Faced with such scorn, Margulis decided to write a book to explain her ideas in full. This, Hillis says, was her most serious scientific crime: she sidestepped the journals’ peer review system. ‘In the minds of many people, she went around the powers that be and took her theories directly to the public,’ Hillis says. This annoyed the biologists greatly – especially when she turned out to be on to something. ‘If it’s a sin to take your theories to the public, then it is a double sin to take your theories to the public and be right.’
Not that the book had an easy ride. Academic Press gave Margulis a contract, but when their peer reviewers poured scorn on the book’s central ideas they refused to publish it. Eventually, Yale University Press took it on. When the book came out, in 1970, Margulis found that crime against her peers didn’t pay. Suddenly she was persona non grata.
Here is how Margulis describes, in a letter to The Sciences, the reaction to a request she made for funds from the National Science Foundation grants for further work on endosymbiosis theory:
I was told by an NSF grants officer (after having been supported nicely for several years) that ‘important’ scientists did not like the theory presented in a book I had written and that they would never fund my work. I was actually told that I should never apply again to the cell biology group at NSF.
Unlike Mereschkowski and Wallin, she didn’t take rejection lying down. A flavour of Margulis’s fighting spirit comes through in her contribution to John Brockman’s book The Third Culture. She describes the great evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith as an engineer who ‘knows much of his biology second hand’. He and his fellow neo-Darwinists Dawkins, Eldredge, Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould ‘codify an incredible ignorance’. Their work is ‘reminiscent of phrenology’ and ‘will look ridiculous in retrospect, because it is ridiculous’.
Margulis does not pull her punches. But that is almost certainly why she is where she is today. She fought hard to get her idea accepted, and it wouldn’t have happened if she had been a shrinking violet. She had to be an anarchist.
In the preface to her rule-breaking book, Margulis quotes the American geneticist Carl Clarence Lindegren. The scientific establishment, Lindegren declared, ‘is permeated with opinions which pass for valid scientific inductions and with contradictions which are disregarded because it is too painful to face the prospect of the revisions of the theory which would be required to reconcile the contradictory