Scientists once believed it might be possible to do this from visual evidence obtained through a microscope. They even presumed that the concept of species, as understood for animals and plants and fungi, could be applied to bacteria. These were useful simplifications in their era—like the simplifications of Newtonian physics, before correction by Einstein—but that era was a long time ago.
The early hero in the field was a man named Ferdinand Julius Cohn, a botanist and microbiologist at the University of Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland) during the late nineteenth century. Cohn is an appealing figure, and only partly because his important contributions have been overshadowed by those of better-remembered contemporaries whose accomplishments were more practical and dramatic: Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, Joseph Lister. They worked on disease, agriculture, and wine. Cohn worked mainly on describing and classifying microscopic organisms. No one makes Hollywood movies about bacterial taxonomists.
Cohn wasn’t the first researcher to classify bacteria, making distinctions between kinds, trying to place the whole group in its proper position on the tree of life. But his effort was more hardheaded and percipient than the others, and he did much to bring bacteriology out of a fog of confusions that had lingered for more than a century, ever since startled observers such as Leeuwenhoek had noticed these little creatures through simple microscopes. Several insights and adjustments of method helped him make progress. Microscopy improved, with better lenses and precision instruments in which they were mounted. Cohn’s lab started culturing bacteria on solid media such as slices of cooked potato, not in liquid nutrient, the old way. That allowed Cohn to choose, cultivate, and consider different strains separately. Also, he recognized that physiological and behavioral characteristics as well as structural ones could be useful for distinguishing bacterial species: How do they grow in different media? How do they move? By this time, too, Cohn had embraced Darwin’s theory of evolution, and so it made sense to him that bacterial strains might change and adapt over time. This was incremental change, very different from the sort of utter transformation—one bacterial form suddenly morphing into another—that some scientists imagined to occur. Cohn didn’t buy transformation. He saw bacteria as fundamentally stable in their identities. Finally, he published his system, dividing them into four tribes: spherical, rod shaped, filamentous, and spiral, each of which got an imposing Latinate name. Within the tribes, he drew finer distinctions, separating them into genera and species.
Not everyone in the field accepted Cohn’s classification of bacterial species or his conviction about their stable identities, and the idea of shape-shifting bacteria lingered for more than a decade. The longer judgment of science historians was good to him, as a man and a scientist, noting his “reserve” against self-promotion, his modesty, his eloquent lecturing, and his success in “disentangling almost everything that was correct and important out of a mass of confused statements on what at that time was a most difficult subject to study.” Besides arguing for the reality of bacterial species and sketching a way to classify them, Cohn did much, along with Pasteur, to kill the resilient delusion that new life-forms arise by spontaneous generation. They don’t, he showed. When bacteria seem to appear out of nowhere, it’s because they have arrived from somewhere: contamination, floating through the air, reawakening spores. Cohn’s work was “entirely modern in its character and expression,” according to an authoritative chronicler of the field, writing in 1938, “and its perusal makes one feel like passing from ancient history to modern times.” But what looked modern in 1938, of course, doesn’t look modern now.
Even the devoutly empirical Ferdinand Cohn made mistakes. For one: after all his research, he still believed, as many of his colleagues did, that bacteria belong to the kingdom of plants. So his tree of life, by later standards, was badly wrong. For another: the premise of radical transformation, one bacterial form to another, turns out to be vastly more complicated than he could imagine.
Chaos” was the name of the group into which Linnaeus, the great systematizer, in the 1774 edition of his Systema Naturae, had lumped Leeuwenhoek’s bacteria and other little creatures. That was a durable judgment. Even well into the twentieth century, decades after Ferdinand Cohn, experts were still arguing about whether bacterial taxonomy was a meaningful enterprise or hopelessly chaotic.
Beginning in 1923, the standard source for identifying bacteria was a thick compendium, Bergey’s Manual of Determinative Bacteriology, edited by the bacteriologist David Hendricks Bergey. But as microbiology progressed, it became clear that the Bergey’s system was vague, inconsistent, and, on some fundamentals, inaccurate. It didn’t offer a tree of bacterial life. It was only a glorified field guide. Still, other researchers who critiqued Bergey’s Manual, and then tried to improve on it, found the critiquing much easier than the improving. The task of bacterial classification was just so difficult. There was almost no fossil record of bacterial ancestors. There weren’t enough differences of external shape and internal anatomy, even as seen through powerful microscopes, to support fine distinctions. Physiological characters could also be misleading, if they reflected parallel adaptations rather than shared ancestry. What did that leave for a classifier to use? (Hint: Carl Woese would offer an answer, but not until 1977.) This conundrum came to a head in 1962, when two of the world’s leading microbiologists, C. B. van Niel and Roger Stanier, essentially threw up their hands in despair.
Van Niel was a Dutchman, educated in Delft, who in 1928 decamped to California, where he taught at a marine biological station that was part of Stanford University. His particular interests were bacterial physiology and taxonomy. Roger Stanier was a younger Canadian who became van Niel’s student, then his special protégé, then his collaborator. In 1941, when Stanier was still just twenty-five years old, he and van Niel coauthored an influential paper on bacterial classification.
That paper stood as definitive for a generation—until both authors renounced it. Stanier himself later admitted some embarrassment about it, all the more so because he had arm-twisted van Niel to sign on as coauthor—student and teacher together, although the work was mainly Stanier’s. What the paper contained, besides a pointed critique of Bergey’s Manual, was a shiny new proposal for classifying bacteria—not just a checklist or a field guide but a “natural” system reflecting their evolutionary relationships. That system divided the familiar bacteria into four major groups (as Ferdinand Cohn had done) and placed them in a kingdom of simple creatures along with just one other group: the blue-green algae.
Algae? Yes, the blue-green algae, as they were then called, had long been an ambiguous group, because they seemed to straddle the line between bacteria and plants. (This was partly what allowed Cohn to believe that all bacteria were plants—the blurry lines around blue-green algae.) Algae was a catchall term for a loose assemblage of creatures that photosynthesize, including these tiny blue-green creatures, but that didn’t mean all algae shared a single common ancestor. Did they? Stanier and van Niel said no. By their new definition of things, blue-green algae were more similar to bacteria than to other algae, and these two groups should be lumped together in a kingdom of their own, apart from everything else. Eventually they labeled such cells procaryotic—meaning “before kernel,” as I’ve mentioned—and set them in contrast to eucaryotic cells, comprising all else. (Their spellings were later corrected, from more accurate transliteration of the Greek roots, to prokaryotic and eukaryotic.) The kernel in question was a cell nucleus. Just as a bacterium doesn’t have one, neither do the creatures that were then known as blue-green algae (and are now classified as cyanobacteria). Advances in microscopy since the end of World War II, including electron microscopy, had given microbiologists a better view of those distinctions and