BIOGRAPHY LYNN MARGULIS

Biography

Lynn Margulis was born in Chicago, to Morris Alexander and Leona Wise Alexander. She was the eldest of four daughters. Her father was an attorney and run a company that made road paints. Her mother operated a travel agency. She entered the Hyde Park Academy High School in 1952, describing herself as a bad student who frequently had to stand in the corner. She recalled that as early as the fourth grade to she was able to "tell bullshit from ... real authentic experience". A precocious child, she was accepted at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools while on her second secondary year at the age of fifteen (she had applied a year earlier). She recalled, "because I wanted to go and they let me in". She entered the university after a year in 1954, and received her 12th grade certificate after being a college student in 1955. In 1957, at age 19, she earned a BA in Liberal Arts. She joined the University of Wisconsin to study biology under Hans Ris and Walter Plaut, her supervisor, and graduated in 1960 with an MS in genetics and zoology. (Her first publication was with Plaut, on the genetics of Euglena, published in 1958 in the Journal of Protozoology.) She then pursued research at the University of California, Berkeley, under the zoologist Max Alfert. Before she could complete her dissertation, she was offered research associateship, and then lecturership, at Brandeis University in Massachusetts in 1964. It was while working there that she obtained her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1965. Her thesis was An Unusual Pattern of Thymidine Incorporation in Euglena. In 1966 she moved to Boston University, where she taught biology for twenty-two years. She was initially an Adjunct Assistant Professor, and appointed to Assistant Professor in 1967. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 1971, to full Professor in 1977, and to University Professor in 1986. In 1988 she was appointed Distinguished Professor of Botany at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She was Distinguished Professor of Biology in 1993. In 1997 she transferred to the Department of Geosciences at Amherst to became Distinguished Professor of Geosciences "with great delight", the post which she held until her death.