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Biodiversity

Tom and Ed, Pioneering Conservation Biology

Thomas Lovejoy and Edward O. Wilson

The two scientists first met in the mid-nineteen-seventies. At that point, Wilson was in his mid-forties, and teaching biology at Harvard. Lovejoy, a dozen years younger, was working for the World Wildlife Fund. Over lunch, they got to talking about where the W.W.F. should focus its efforts. They agreed that it should be in the tropics, because the tropics are where most species actually live. There wasn’t a good term for what they were trying to preserve, so they tossed one around—“biological diversity”—and put it into circulation. “People just started using it,” Lovejoy recalled, in an interview in 2015. (Later, the phrase would be shortened to “biodiversity.”)

• https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/honoring-the-legacy-of-e-o-wilson-and-tom-lovejoy

Tree of Life

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Earth BioGenome Project

Announcing a goal to sequence 1.5 million genomes

Science goes worldwide to the source to study biodiversity, evolutionary lineages, sequencing most known animal, plant, protozoan and fungal species collectively known as eukaryotes over the next decade...