Lynn Margulis
Lynn Margulis is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983, received from William J. Clinton the Presidential Medal of Science in 1999. The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., announced in 1998 that it will permanently archive her papers. She was a faculty mentor at Boston University for 22 years.
Lynn had only started college at the age of 15 but she was not intimidated by the complexity of genetics. After becoming a graduate student in genetics she began to question well-established ideas about heredity and evolution. While she had been at the University of Wisconsin, Lynn became aware of the pattern of inheritance in components of the cytoplasm in plants and algae that did not seem to result from genes in the nucleus. By using an electron microscope, she was able to study chloroplasts and mitochondria in detail.