I guess "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" when it comes to Tom's prose. The first paragraph-length sentence you quote below is ridiculous in my opinion (although very memorable, I'll agree). The sentences about cellular mergers via symbiogenesis is quite good, I agree. I personally found that Tom's writings in the 70s and 80s were much clearer and more professional. Towards the end his writing appeared more and more frenzied and 'stream-of-consciousness' with long passages editorializing on the shortcomings of others' points of view. In my view, if he wanted more people to understand his work, he should have put more effort into refining what he wrote and making it more accessible. All of the above is just my opinion and I totally respect that you and others might see things differently! When it comes to discussing "quality of prose", it really seems just to be a matter of taste. So I'm not suggesting you change anything here, I'm just sharing my thoughts for what they are worth!

Uwe Maier and Susan Douglas. It was definitely a three-way collaboration as Sue was an independent scientist at the National Research Council in Halifax.

pencil?

This is a bit unclear/awkward. Suggest rephrasing.

ss

on

Where is this autobiography? I'd love to see it.

of

I think it is based on ancient paralog rooting analyses done in the 90s (see Baldauf, Palmer and Doolittle 1996: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8755547/). I think Tom is being a bit too dismissive here. Even if he didn't believe the result, it is a result based on an analysis of data not simply "dogma".

root

I don't agree. Tom's inference that LECA was an "excavate" type cell is similar to what we proposed in Williamson et al., but topologically his idea is quite different from our proposed root.

As you know, Tom explicitly proposed the Archezoa as a paraphyletic taxon -- he never believed they formed a clade.

This is where the issue of the definition of monophyly (that you discuss below) becomes difficult. In Tom's view the original Archezoa were "monophyletic but paraphyletic"...but most reader's conception of monophyly means "forms a clade". As you know, Tom never thought they were a clade. If I were you I'd say something like "members of the original Archezoa were not deeply-branching lineages in the eukaryote tree".

magisterial?

I'm a bit skeptical of some aspects of this work.

warned

missing n

missing space

Did the idea of membrane heredity originally come from Gunter Blobel?

"t"

uppercase

He's right. Bill Martin still uses this argument.

This result was simultaneously published by me and my colleagues and two other groups. So credit goes to all 3 groups equally. The other two groups are: Horner et al. : https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article-abstract/263/1373/1053/69332/Molecular-data-suggest-an-early-acquisition-of-the?redirectedFrom=fulltext<br /> and Bui et al. https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.93.18.9651

The relative timing of the kinds of evidence here and what Tom was responding to in his papers is a bit complicated. Mitochondrial hsp70 proteins were described in 1997 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982206004209). I think it was both the phylogenetic evidence and the mt-hsp70s that swayed Tom. Note that the evidence that Microsporidia were fungi was first published by Tom Edlund (prior to the Keeling paper). I know this because I reviewed Edlund's paper and it was the first hint that we had that microsporidia were fungi...Patrick Keeling was a fellow graduate student in Ford Doolittle's labin 1995 and both he and I had sequenced tubulin genes from Nosema locustae (Antonospora locustae) at that time, but hadn't done the phylogenies: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1055790396900317?via%3Dihub

"apparently mitochondria-less" might be better since we now know they don't really lack mitochondria.

So Sogin was careful in his paper to talk about analyses of "16S-like rDNA" because his analyses included both 18S (eukaryotes) and 16S (prokaryotes) sequences.

I would suggest "Archezoa were a paraphyletic group that included the metamonads..."

As you probably know Tom was well aware of what the latest phylogenies by others showed w.r.t. eukaryotes being derived from within Archaea. I believe he strongly argued in his 2020 paper that these were artefacts. He thought that the unique membrane characteristics of Archaea were an important synapomorphy that argued for an archaeal clade to the exclusion of eukaryotes. I honestly think that part of this is because Tom liked to be iconoclastic and represent sides of arguments that weren't mainstream. I remember arguing with him about whether or not eukaryotes came from within Archaea and, in conversation at least, he thought it was plausible that they did...but he definitely thought people shouldn't accept it as readily as they had.

I think he used this in the 1987 NY Acad Sci. paper. Might be good to cite it here.

cite his first usage?

"es"

Did he invent this term? If so, that's very interesting as I've never known who did. Do you know in what paper he introduces the term?

eukaryogenesis

Its not necessary to change this but I also think he very much bought-in to the prestige of Oxford . I suspect he thought the Oxbridge universities were the best in the world.

maybe "move to South Africa for a one-year sabbatical."

I believe that Tom's position at UBC was actually created and funded (at least in part) by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. I think Ford Doolittle, who was the Director of the CIAR Evolutionary Biology Program, actively recruited Tom and the deal was made with UBC to create a position. I'm not 100% certain of that, but perhaps you can ask someone (Ema?) if I'm right about that. Ford's email is "ford@dal.ca" and he might remember -- I'm sure he'd answer your email if you send him one.

delete

delete comma

"awarded" maybe?

delete "o"

tly

his