The Discovery of Life on Earth
Speaker:
David Hillis
20 Feb 2008
8:00 PM
Sun Room, Memorial Union
David Hillis is an internationally recognized molecular and organismal biologist. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a previous MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Hillis has made major contributions to the study of biological diversity using molecular genetic techniques. He brings twenty-first-century technology to longstanding and fundamental questions in biology, such as Why are there so many kinds of organisms? How did this diversity come about? He is the author of a popular textbook on molecular systematics and has published more than 150 scholarly articles. He is currently the Alfred W. Roark Centennial Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin. The Annual Charles E. Bessey Lecture.
This lecture was made possible in part by the generosity of F. Wendell Miller, who left his entire estate jointly to Iowa State University and the University of Iowa. Mr. Miller, who died in 1995 at age 97, was born in Altoona, Illinois, grew up in Rockwell City, graduated from Grinnell College and Harvard Law School and practiced law in Des Moines and Chicago before returning to Rockwell City to manage his family's farm holdings and to practice law. His will helped to establish the F. Wendell Miller Trust, the annual earnings on which, in part, helped to support this activity.