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Biography
Doolittle received a BA (Biochemical Sciences magna cum laude) from Harvard College (1963) and a PhD (Biochemical Sciences) from Stanford University (1969, with Charles Yanofsky). He did postdoctoral work at the University of Illinois (with Sol Spiegelman) and National Jewish Hospital, Denver (with Norman Pace). For 48 years at Dalhousie (300+ publications), his focus has been on genome evolution (early events and microbial processes). Contributions have been both experimental (proof of the endosymbiotic origin of chloroplasts, eukaryotic nuclear origins, genetic methods for manipulating archaea, lateral [between-species] gene transfer and metagenomics) and theoretical (origins of introns, “selfish DNA”, meaning of the Tree of Life, levels of selection). He was for 20 years the Director of CIFAR’s Evolutionary Biology program. Since receiving the 2013 Gerhard Herzberg Gold Medal from NSERC, his primary aim has been disciplinary integration of the philosophy of biology with molecular biological and genomic research, in particular as these bear on notions of function (in the context of “junk DNA”), evolutionary individuality and processes in multispecies microbial communities. He was a Guggenheim Fellow (1985) and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (since 1991), and an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences (since 2002). In 2017 he won the Killam Prize in Natural Sciences awarded by the Canada Council for the Arts.