There is a wonderful tribute to Norm Pace in the Atlantic by Ed Yong. Norm Pace truly did blow the door off the microbial world.
Source: Norm Pace Blew The Door Off The Microbial World – The Atlantic
Lots of good stuff in there about Pace and his career. See for example this:
Pace also has a reputation for being straight-talking, to the point of rudeness if he thinks someone is wrong. “He’s always been very direct and unvarnished: What you see is what you get,” says Philip Hugenholtz, a microbiologist and former postdoc of Pace’s. He has a somber side to him, too. When I last spoke to him, he spent a lot of time talking about population growth and doomsday situations—a tendency that others who know him also recall. “It was like the weather with Norm: You were never quite sure what it was going to be,” says Ruth Ley. “He would bring up these gloomy scenarios of mass extinction, and he once told me: Don’t blink because your life’s over before you know it.”
And if you want to read some of the many things I have written about Norm Pace, well, here are some links:
- Wrap up of talk by Norm Pace on “Metagenomics and the Tree of Life”
- Retroblogging seminar by Norm Pace on Invisible Diversity from 1990
- Article in @nytimes on Norm Pace’s lab’s work on microbial diversity in municipal water supplies
- Special Seminar at #UCDavis: Dr. Norman Pace on Metagenomics and the Tree of Life
- Retirement Symposium for Norman Pace–a “Normposium”
- Norman Pace visits UC Davis
- Time for a Nobel Prize for the human microbiome? I think so … what do you think?
- Just say no (to prokaryotes) – a lesson in Google Drive autocorrect
- Here’s hoping molecular classification/systematics of cultured & uncultured microbes wins #NobelPrize in medicine