Biography - W. Ford Doolittle

W. Ford Doolittle was born in Urbana, Illinois, in 1942. He received a B.A. in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard College in 1963, having completed an honours thesis on bacteriophages of Corynebacterium diphtheriae with the late A.M. Pappenheimer, Jr.

Doolittle’s Ph.D. work at Stanford University, with Charles Yanofsky, focused on the regulation of tryptophan biosynthesis in Escherichia coli. A short postdoctoral period with Sol Spiegelman in Urbana was followed by two years with Norman Pace at the National Jewish Hospital and Research Center in Denver, Colorado, where he worked on ribosomal RNA synthesis.

In 1971, Doolittle joined the Department of Biochemistry at Dalhousie University with an MRC scholarship as support. His research at Dalhousie has, in successive periods, focused on: cyanobacteria (ribosomal RNA synthesis, gene expression, metabolism, and evolution); proof of the endosymbiont hypothesis for the origin of chloroplasts; molecular biology of archaea; development of genetic tools and genetic maps for halobacteria; origin and early evolution of eukaryotes; and, in recent years, the role and importance of lateral transfer in prokaryotic evolution.

In addition to work in these areas of experimental biology, he has made periodic contributions to the theory of gene and genome evolution. In 1986, Doolittle became a Fellow and Director of the Evolutionary Biology Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research—positions he still holds today. The Institute has fostered the interactions and supported many of the collaborators whose work is described above.

In April 2001, Doolittle was appointed to a Canada Research Chair in Comparative Genomics. And in April, 2002, he was made a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.