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How did lynn margulis die

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On November 22, 2011, Lynn Margulis, visionary biologist and tireless champion of the microbial world, died of a massive stroke. Born in 1938, Lynn was intellectually precocious, earning her bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago at age 18 and a Berkeley PhD 6 years later. Lynn’s enduring place in science was earned soon thereafter, with the publication of her theory of endosymbiosis, a radical and, as it turned out, lasting explanation for the origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts, the organelles responsible for energy metabolism in eukaryotic cells. In Lynn’s view, the chloroplast originated as a free-living cyanobacterium engulfed by a protozoan and reduced through time to metabolic slavery. Similarly, she hypothesized that the mitochondrion descended from an endosymbiotic bacterium capable of aerobic respiration. Unbeknownst to Lynn at the time, the Russian biologist Konstantin Merezhkovsky had published a similar proposal as early as 1905. However, Merezhkovsky’s ideas were largely ridiculed or forgotten, and when Margulis resurrected them, criticism was harsh. S

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Lynn Margulis

Lynn Margulis was born March 5, 1938 to Leone and Morris Alexander in Chicago, Illinois. She was the oldest of four girls born to the homemaker and lawyer. Lynn took an early interest in her education, especially science classes. After only two years at Hyde Park High School in Chicago, she was accepted into the early entrant program at the University of Chicago at the young age of 14.

By the time Lynn was 19, she had acquired a B.A. of Liberal Arts from the University of Chicago. She then enrolled at the University of Wisconsin for graduate studies. In 1960, Lynn Margulis had obtained an M.S. in Genetics and Zoology and then went on to work at getting a Ph.D. in Genetics at the University of California, Berkeley. She ended up finishing her doctoral work at Brandeis University in Massachusetts in 1965.

Personal Life

While at the University of Chicago, Lynn met the now famous Physicist Carl Sagan while he was doing his graduate work in Physics at the college. They married shortly before Lynn finished her B.A. in 1957. They had two sons, Dorion and Jeremy. L

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Lynn Margulis (1938-2011)

Internationally renowned evolutionary biologist and author Lynn Margulis, a Distinguished University Professor of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a National Medal of Science recipient, died Nov. 22, 2011 at her home in Amherst. She was 73.

“She was a different kind of scientist, one who does not come along very often. Her great gift was making connections, connections that others just couldn’t make.” – Steve Goodwin, dean of the College of Natural Sciences at UMass Amherst

Margulis was best known for her theory of symbiogenesis, which challenges central tenets of neo-Darwinism. She argued that inherited variation, significant in evolution, does not come mainly from random mutations. Rather, new tissues, organs, and even new species evolve primarily through the long-lasting intimacy of strangers. The fusion of genomes in symbioses followed by natural selection, she suggests, leads to increasingly complex levels of individuality. Margulis was also acknowledged for her contribution to James E. Lovelock&