Carl Woese: A structural biologist’s perspective

Not long after Carl Woese died, I received a message from Robin Gutell asking if I would contribute an article to this issue of RNA Biology. While my admiration for Carl’s contributions to biology knows no bounds, I did not know him well personally. For that reason I advised Robin to strike my name off the list of contributors and replace it with that of someone who is better qualified than I am, but he persisted, and here we are. I guess Robin thought it would be useful to hear from one of those who admired Carl from afar. The naïve outsider might find it surprising that a structural biologist like me, who worries about the minutia of the three-dimensional structures of biological macromolecules, would ever have had anything in common with a big-picture, evolutionary biologist like Carl, but I did. What we shared was an interest in the structures of RNAs, especially rRNAs.