Carl Richard Woese (; July 15, 1928 – December 30, 2012) was an American microbiologist and biophysicist. Woese is famous for defining the Archaea (a new domain of life) in 1977 through a pioneering phylogenetic taxonomy of 16S ribosomal RNA, a technique that has revolutionized microbiology. He also originated the RNA world hypothesis in 1967, although not by that name. Woese held the Stanley O. Ikenberry Chair and was professor of microbiology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Life and education Carl Woese was born in Syracuse, New York on July 15, 1928. Woese attended Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from Amherst College in 1950. During his time at Amherst, Woese took only one biology course (Biochemistry, in his senior year) and had "no scientific interest in plants and animals" until advised by William M. Fairbank, then an assistant professor of physics at Amherst, to pursue biophysics at Yale. In 1953, he completed a PhD in biophysics at Yale University, where his doctoral research focused on the inactivation of viruses by heat and ionizing radiation. He studied medicine at the University of Rochester for two years, quitting two days into a pediatrics rotation. Then he became a postdoctoral researcher in biophysics at Yale University investigating bacterial spores. From 1960–63, he worked as a biophysicist at the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York. In 1964, Woese joined the microbiology faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he focused on Archaea, genomics, and molecular evolution as his areas of expertise. He became a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign's Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, which was renamed in his honor in 2015, after his death. Woese died on December 30, 2012, following complications from pancreatic cancer, leaving as survivors his wife Gabriella and a son and daughter. Work and discoveries Early work on the genetic code Woese turned his attention to the genetic code while setting up his lab at General Electric's Knolls Laboratory in the fall of 1960. Interest among physicists and molecular biologists had begun to coalesce around deciphering the correspondence between the twenty amino acids and the four letter alphabet of nucleic acid bases in the decade following James D. Watson, Francis Crick, and Rosalind Franklin's discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953. Woese published a series of papers on the