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Lynn Margulis
Sign in to saveAlso known as Margulis, Lynn Petra Alexander, Lynn Sagan
American evolutionary biologist (1938–2011)
OverviewAI-generated
Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) was an American university teacher, botanist, zoologist, and ecologist. Born in Chicago, she worked in the field of cell biology. Her academic career included positions at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Boston University. She was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Margulis received several honors, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Medal of Science, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal. She was educated at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Harvard University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work was influenced by Ivan Wallin.
She was married to Carl Sagan, and they had a child named Dorion Sagan. Margulis died in Amherst. Her archives are held at the Library of Congress. Among her published works are *Five kingdoms*, *The microcosmos coloring book*, and *Evolución ambiental*.
Synthesized by Vinony from 37 facts across 7 sources: Wikidata, Crossref, Open Library, MusicBrainz, Last.fm, Vinony collections, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- human
- Given name
- Petra
- Family name
- Alexander
- Gender
- female
- Citizenship
- United States
- Place of birth
- Chicago
- Place of death
- Amherst
- Spouse
- Carl Sagan
- Occupation
- evolutionary biologist
- Educated at
- University of Chicago Laboratory Schools
- Employer
- Boston University
- Languages spoken
- English language
- Field of work
- cell biology
- Official website
- www.geo.umass.edu/faculty/margulis
- Image
- Lynn Margulis.jpg
Show 9 more facts
- Commons category
- Lynn Margulis
- date of birth
- 1938-03-05
- date of death
- 2011-11-22
- archives at
- Library of Congress
- influenced by
- Ivan Wallin
- P6944
- Lynn Margulis
- married name
- Lynn Alexander Sagan
- described at URL
- v2.nl/people/lynn-margulis
Sources (9)
via Wikidata · CC0
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Encyclopedic overview
Lynn Margulis (born Lynn Petra Alexander; March 5, 1938 – November 22, 2011) was an American evolutionary biologist, who was the primary modern proponent for the significance of symbiosis in evolution. In particular, Margulis transformed and fundamentally framed biologists' understanding of the evolution of the Eukaryotes, organisms with nuclei in their cells. She proposed that they came into being by symbiotic mergers of bacteria. Margulis was the co-developer of the Gaia hypothesis with the British chemist James Lovelock, proposing that the Earth functions as a unified self-regulating system, and the principal defender and promulgator of the five kingdom classification of Robert Whittaker.
Throughout her career, Margulis' work could arouse intense objections, and her formative paper, "On the Origin of Mitosing Cells", appeared in 1967 after being rejected by about fifteen journals. Still a junior faculty member at Boston University at the time, her theory that cell organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts were once independent bacteria was largely ignored for another decade, becoming widely accepted only after it was powerfully substantiated through genetic evidence. Margulis was elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences in 1983. President Bill Clinton presented her the National Medal of Science in 1999. The Linnean Society of London awarded her the Darwin-Wallace Medal in 2008.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Lynn Margulis” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.