Acceptance address by Dr. Andrew Herbert Knoll

Dr. Andrew Herbert Knoll   

I feel both exhilarated and humbled to stand before you today. Exhilarated by the thought that colleagues would even nominate me for such a remarkable honor. And humbled to have been singled out among the community of talented scientists who work day by day to reconstruct life’s immense history.

I am grateful to your Majesties, the Emperor and Empress, for gracing this ceremony and for your steadfast support of fundamental biology. It is wonderful that the Imperial Household not only supports biology but participates actively in the quest to understand nature, beginning with the Emperor Showa’s years of research on marine biology and continuing with his Majesty’s current investigations of gobiid fishes. I also thank the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for its powerful support of biological research and education.

Scientists who arrive at the extraordinary place where I find myself today generally stand at the confluence of two intellectual streams. First, there is the stream that flowed to us from our own teachers. My mentors included Elso Barghoorn, pioneer in the paleontological search for Earth’s earliest life; Dick Holland, a towering geochemist who set the stage for research on Earth’s environmental history; and Stephen Jay Gould, who fueled my interest in evolution. The other stream connects us with the students and postdocs who have worked in our laboratories – a steady stream of ideas and insights that most definitely runs in two directions. Knoll lab alumni are a superb group of scientists who are taking studies of paleontology, geobiology, and Earth history in new directions, and I am grateful for and proud of them all. I have also benefitted tremendously from colleagues with whom I have partnered in research. There are many, but here I mention John Hayes, who taught me everything I know about biogeochemistry; Keene Swett and Brian Harland who introduced me to Arctic research; John Grotzinger, partner for the past twenty-five years in fieldwork that has ranged from Namibia and Siberia to, virtually at least, Mars; and Dick Bambach, who has long challenged me to strike out in fresh directions. Lastly, I gratefully acknowledge the love and support of my wife Marsha and my children, Kirsten and Rob. Without them, I wouldn’t be here today. The fundamental biology celebrated by the International Prize addresses a grand question: how did the world around us come to be? In part that is a question of process, and so the Prize rightfully acknowledges research in ecology, development and genetics. But it is also a question of history, and I deeply appreciate that paleontology stands among the disciplines recognized by this unique award. Without paleontology, we would have no idea that dinosaurs even existed, much less that they lived with mammals unlike any we see today in forests of extinct plants, or that dinosaurs and myriad other species disappeared during global catastrophe 66 million years ago.

My vision for paleontology is one in which the fossils we discover are interpreted within a framework of Earth’s dynamic environmental history. Indeed, life is a planetary phenomenon, born of planetary processes, sustained by planetary processes, and through time emerging as a set of planetary processes important in its own right. The profound and ever-changing interactions between life and environment have shaped both evolution and physical Earth, and investigating this grand interplay helps us to understand both where we came from and where we may be headed in the face 21st century global change.

Thank you again for this exceptional honor.