Walter Monroe Fitch (May 21, 1929 – March 10, 2011) was a pioneering American researcher in

molecular evolution Molecular evolution is the process of change in the sequence composition of cellular molecules such as DNA, RNA, and proteins across generations. The field of molecular evolution uses principles of evolutionary biology and population genetics ...

Education and career

Fitch attended

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, where he graduated with an

A.B. Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four yea ...

in chemistry in 1953 and a Ph.D. in comparative biochemistry in 1958. Fitch spent 24 years at the

University of Wisconsin–Madison A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United Stat ...

, followed by three years at the

University of Southern California , mottoeng = "Let whoever earns the palm bear it" , religious_affiliation = Nonsectarian—historically Methodist , established = , accreditation = WSCUC , type = Private research university , academic_affiliations = , endowment = $8.1 ...

and then was

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who professes". Professors ...

at the

University of California, Irvine The University of California, Irvine (UCI or UC Irvine) is a public land-grant research university in Irvine, California. One of the ten campuses of the University of California system, UCI offers 87 undergraduate degrees and 129 graduate and p ...

, until his death. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the

American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...

, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was a Foreign Member of the London

Linnean Society The Linnean Society of London is a learned society dedicated to the study and dissemination of information concerning natural history, evolution, and taxonomy. It possesses several important biological specimen, manuscript and literature colle ...

. He co-founded the journal ''

Molecular Biology and Evolution ''Molecular Biology and Evolution'' is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. It publishes work in the intersection of molecular biology and evo ...

'', with

Masatoshi Nei (born January 2, 1931) is a Japanese-born American evolutionary biologist currently affiliated with the Department of Biology at Temple University as a Carnell Professor. He was, until recently, Evan Pugh Professor of Biology at Pennsylvania S ...

, and was the first president of the

Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution The Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE) is a scientific and academic organization founded in 1982 to support academic research in the field of molecular evolution. The society hosts an annual meeting, typically in June or July. It al ...

Research

Fitch is noted for his pioneering work on reconstruction of

phylogenies A phylogenetic tree (also phylogeny or evolutionary tree Felsenstein J. (2004). ''Inferring Phylogenies'' Sinauer Associates: Sunderland, MA.) is a branching diagram or a tree showing the evolutionary relationships among various biological spec ...

(evolutionary trees) from

protein Proteins are large biomolecules and macromolecules that comprise one or more long chains of amino acid residues. Proteins perform a vast array of functions within organisms, including catalysing metabolic reactions, DNA replication, res ...

and

DNA sequences A nucleic acid sequence is a succession of bases signified by a series of a set of five different letters that indicate the order of nucleotides forming alleles within a DNA (using GACT) or RNA (GACU) molecule. By convention, sequences are us ...

. Among his achievements are the first major paper on

distance matrix In mathematics, computer science and especially graph theory, a distance matrix is a square matrix (two-dimensional array) containing the distances, taken pairwise, between the elements of a set. Depending upon the application involved, the ''dist ...

methods, which introduced the Fitch–Margoliash method (with

Emanuel Margoliash Emanuel Margoliash (February 10, 1920 – April 10, 2008) was a biochemist who spent much of his career studying the protein cytochrome c. He is best known for his work on molecular evolution; with Walter Fitch, he devised Fitch-Margoliash met ...

) which seeks the tree that best predicts a set of pairwise distances among species. He also developed the Fitch

maximum parsimony In phylogenetics, maximum parsimony is an optimality criterion under which the phylogenetic tree that minimizes the total number of character-state changes (or miminizes the cost of differentially weighted character-state changes) is preferred. ...

algorithm, which evaluates rapidly and exactly the minimum number of changes of state of a sequence on a given phylogeny. His definition of orthologous sequences has been frequently cited and is used as a reference in many research publications.

Selected publications

* Fitch, W. M. and E. Margoliash. (1967). Construction of phylogenetic trees. ''Science'' 155: 279–284. * Fitch, W. M. (1970). Distinguishing homologous from analogous proteins. ''

Systematic Biology Biological systematics is the study of the diversification of living forms, both past and present, and the relationships among living things through time. Relationships are visualized as evolutionary trees (synonyms: cladograms, phylogenetic tr ...

'' 19 (2): 99-113. * Fitch, W. M. (1971). Toward defining the course of evolution: minimum change for a specified tree topology. '' Systematic Zoology'' 20 (4): 406-416 * Fitch, W. M. (2012). ''The Three Failures of Creationism: Logic, Rhetoric, and Science''. University of California Press.

References

External links

Obituary
at the National Center for Science Education
Retrospective in ''Science''Francisco J. Ayala, "Walter Monroe Fitch", Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences (2011)My memory of Walter Fitch and starting Molecular Biology and Evolution
{{DEFAULTSORT:Fitch, Walter M. American biologists Influenza researchers Fellows of the Linnean Society of London University of California, Irvine faculty 1929 births 2011 deaths Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Evolutionary biologists Members of the American Philosophical Society University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty University of California, Berkeley alumni University of Southern California faculty People from San Diego