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Fifty-Year Old and Still Ticking.... An Interview with Emile Zuckerkandl on the 50th Anniversary of the Molecular Clock

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Abstract

In 1962, a young post-doctoral fellow and a prominent Nobel Prize winner, Emile Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling, published a seminal paper that described the relationship between the average number of aminoacid replacements and divergence time, known as the molecular clock (Zuckerkandl and Pauling 1962). Fifty years after the original publication, I was fortunate enough to interview Emile Zuckerkandl. We shared thoughts on his life and the historical events that led to the discovery of the molecular clock.

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References

  • Zuckerkandl E, Pauling LB (1962) Molecular disease, evolution, and genetic heterogeneity. In: Kasha M, Pullman B (eds) Horizons in biochemistry. Academic Press, New York, pp 189–225

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  • Zuckerkandl E, Pauling LB (1965) Molecules as documents of evolutionary history. J Theor Biol 8:357–366

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Acknowledgments

I would like again to thank Emile and Jane Zuckerkandl for inviting me to share a moment of their life, and Giorgio Bernardi for being the impetus of this interview.

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Correspondence to Giacomo Bernardi.

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Bernardi, G. Fifty-Year Old and Still Ticking.... An Interview with Emile Zuckerkandl on the 50th Anniversary of the Molecular Clock. J Mol Evol 74, 233–236 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00239-012-9511-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00239-012-9511-6

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