Allan Charles Wilson was born on 18 October 1934 at Ngaruawahia, New Zealand. He died in Seattle, Washington, on 21 July 1991 while undergoing treatment for leukaemia. Allan was known as a pioneering and highly innovative biochemist, helping to define the field of molecular evolution and establish the use of a molecular clock to measure evolutionary change between living species. The molecular clock, a method of measuring the timescale of evolutionary change between two organisms on the basis of the number of mutations that they have accumulated since last sharing a common genetic ancestor, was an idea initially championed by Émile Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling (Zuckerkandl & Pauling 1962), on the basis of their observations that the number of changes in an amino acid sequence was roughly linear with time in the aligned haemoglobin proteins of animals. Although it is now not unusual to see the words ‘molecular evolution’ and ‘molecular phylogeny’ together, when Allan formed his own biochemistry laboratory in 1964 at the University of California, Berkeley, many scientists in the field of evolutionary biology considered these ideas complete heresy. Allan’s death at the relatively young age of 56 years left behind his wife, Leona (deceased in 2009), a daughter, Ruth (b. 1961), and a son, David (b. 1964), as well his as mother, Eunice (deceased in 2002), a younger brother, Gary Wilson, and a sister, Colleen Macmillan, along with numerous nieces, nephews and cousins in New Zealand, Australia and the USA. In this short span of time, he trained more than 55 doctoral students and helped launch the careers of numerous postdoctoral fellows.
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