Science is all about making discoveries. That's it! It was my good fortune and Carl's good fortune to share an experiment that produced an unexpected result. In the 1960s, Carl became interested in the classification of bacteria with the ultimate goal of defining the relatedness of bacterial groups as well as events in the evolution of these organisms. He proposed to do this by studying the sequence of monomers in proteins or nucleic acids. Study of the sequence of amino acids in conserved proteins had severe limitations and could not serve Carl's purpose. However, the publication by Sanger of a technique for analysis of RNA caught Carl's attention. His previous experiments with the ribosome had convinced him that this organelle was of very ancient origin; it had only one role in the cell and so was "insulated" from the vast phenotypic variations of bacterial cells.
Keywords: Carl Woese; RNA; archaea; classification; ribosome.