Vincent M. Sarich
| Vincent M. Sarich | |
|---|---|
| Born |
December 13, 1934 Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Died |
October 27, 2012 (aged 77) Seattle, Washington, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Anthropology |
| Institutions | University of Auckland |
| Alma mater | Illinois Institute of Technology University of California, Berkeley |
| Doctoral advisor | Sherwood Washburn |
| Known for | Research in human evolution |
| Notable awards | Kistler Prize (2004) |
Vincent Matthew Sarich (December 13, 1934 – October 27, 2012) was an American Professor Emeritus in anthropology at UC Berkeley.
Born in Chicago, he received a bachelor of science in chemistry from Illinois Institute of Technology and his masters and doctorate in anthropology from University of California, Berkeley, where he was supervised by Sherwood Washburn. He was a member of the Department of Anthropology at Stanford from 1967 to 1981, and taught at UC Berkeley from 1966 through 1994.
As a doctoral student, and along with his PhD supervisor Allan Wilson, Sarich measured the strength of immunological cross-reactions of blood serum albumin between pairs of creatures, including humans and African apes (chimpanzees and gorillas). The strength of the reaction could be expressed numerically as an Immunological Distance, which was in turn proportional to the number of amino acid differences between homologous proteins in different species. By constructing a calibration curve of the I.D. of species' pairs with known divergence times in the fossil record, the data could be used as a molecular clock to estimate the times of divergence of pairs with poorer or unknown fossil records.
In their seminal paper in 1967 in Science, Sarich and Wilson estimated the divergence time of humans and apes as four to five million years ago, at a time when standard interpretations of the fossil record gave this divergence as at least 10 to as much as 30 million years. Subsequent fossil discoveries, notably Lucy, and reinterpretation of older fossil materials, notably Ramapithecus, showed the younger estimates to be correct and validated the albumin method. Application of the molecular clock principle revolutionized the study of molecular evolution.
...
Wikipedia