![]() ![]() Two Germans, Albert Frank and Anton de Bary, provided the perfect one- symbiosis, from the Greek for “together” and “living.” This kind of mutually beneficial relationship was unheard-of, and required a new word. ![]() The alga uses sunlight to make nutrients for the fungus, while the fungus provides minerals, water, and shelter. ![]() Schwendener wrongly thought that the fungus had “enslaved” the alga, but others showed that the two cooperate. The backlash only collapsed when Schwendener and others, with good microscopes and careful hands, managed to tease the two partners apart. This “dual hypothesis” was met with indignation: It went against the impetus to put living things in clear and discrete buckets. But in 1868, a Swiss botanist named Simon Schwendener revealed that they’re composite organisms, consisting of fungi that live in partnership with microscopic algae. In the 1860s, scientists thought that they were plants. Lichens have an important place in biology. They grow in the most inhospitable parts of the planet, where no plant or animal can survive. They can look like flecks of peeling paint, or coralline branches, or dustings of powder, or lettuce-like fronds, or wriggling worms, or cups that a pixie might drink from. On closer inspection, they are astonishingly beautiful. At first glance, they look messy and undeserving of attention. They grow on logs, cling to bark, smother stones. You’ve seen lichens before, but unlike Spribille, you may have ignored them. Throughout his undergraduate and postgraduate work, Spribille became an expert on the organisms that had grabbed his attention during his time in the Montana forests-lichens. “They said that under exceptional circumstances, they could enroll a few people every year without transcripts,” Spribille says. His missing qualifications were still a problem, but one that the University of Göttingen decided to overlook. Thanks to his family background, he could speak German, and he had heard that many universities there charged no tuition fees. His meager savings and nonexistent grades meant that no American university would take him, so Spribille looked to Europe. Within a few years, he had earned enough to leave home. He longed to break away from his roots and get a proper education.Īt 19, he got a job at a local forestry service. He was raised in a Montana trailer park, and homeschooled by what he now describes as a “fundamentalist cult.” At a young age, he fell in love with science, but had no way of feeding that love. Back then, his life seemed constrained to a very different path. In 1995, if you had told Toby Spribille that he’d eventually overthrow a scientific idea that’s been the stuff of textbooks for 150 years, he would have laughed at you. ![]()
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