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A lot of little organisms that looked like bacteria and behaved like bacteria were actually something else altogether—something that had branched off from bacteria a long time ago. Woese called these organisms archaebacteria, later shortened to archaea.
許多小生物看上去像細(xì)菌，表現(xiàn)得像細(xì)菌，實(shí)際上完全是另一類東西——那類東西很久以前已經(jīng)從細(xì)菌中分離出去。沃斯把這種微生物叫做原始細(xì)菌。
It has be said that the attributes that distinguish archaea from bacteria are not the sort that would quicken the pulse of any but a biologist. They are mostly differences in their lipids and an absence of something called peptidoglycan. But in practice they make a world of difference. Archaeans are more different from bacteria than you and I are from a crab or spider. Singlehandedly Woese had discovered an unsuspected division of life, so fundamental that it stood above the level of kingdom at the apogee of the Universal Tree of Life, as it is rather reverentially known.
不是不說，原始細(xì)菌區(qū)別于細(xì)菌的特性只會令生物學(xué)家感到激動。這些特性大多體現(xiàn)在脂質(zhì)的不同，還缺少一種名叫肽聚糖的東西。而實(shí)際上，這就構(gòu)成了天壤之別。原始細(xì)菌對于細(xì)菌，比之你和我對于螃蟹或蜘蛛還要不同。沃斯獨(dú)自一人發(fā)現(xiàn)了一種未知的基本生命種類。它高于“界”的層面，位于被相當(dāng)尊敬地稱之為世界生命之巔的地方。
In 1976, he startled the world—or at least the little bit of it that was paying attention—by redrawing the tree of life to incorporate not five main divisions, but twenty-three. These he grouped under three new principal categories—Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya (sometimes spelled Eucarya)—which he called domains.
1976年，他重繪了生命樹，包括了不是5個而是23個主要“部”，令世界——至少令關(guān)注這件事的少部分人——大吃一驚。他把這些部歸在他稱之為“域”的3個新的主要類別下面——細(xì)菌、原始細(xì)菌和真核細(xì)菌。
Woese's new divisions did not take the biological world by storm. Some dismissed them as much too heavily weighted toward the microbial. Many just ignored them. Woese, according to Frances Ashcroft, "felt bitterly disappointed." But slowly his new scheme began to catch on among microbiologists.
沃斯的新的分類法在生物學(xué)界沒有引起轟動。有的人對他的體系不屑一顧，認(rèn)為它過于分偏向于微生物。許多人完全不予理睬。據(jù)弗朗西斯·阿什克拉夫特說，沃斯“感到極其失望”。但是，他的新方案漸漸開始被微生物學(xué)家們接受。
