Chisholm sees big impacts from small sources
The marine organism that Sallie “Penny” Chisholm, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor in Environmental Studies at MIT, discovered back in 1988 is so vanishingly small that nobody had ever noticed it before. But this very tiny organism, which Chisholm named Prochlorococcus, turns out to have a huge impact, despite its diminutive size — just one micron, or a millionth of a meter, across. In fact, it is responsible for producing a significant fraction of the oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere. Studying this remarkably abundant and diverse organism has turned out to be the core of Chisholm’s career, and has earned her honors including the National Medal of Science and the James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award, MIT’s highest faculty honor. On Tuesday, Chisholm presented the annual Killian Faculty Achievement Award Lecture, in which she described the long road to discovery of the abundance, impact, and diversity of Prochlorococcus. “Our view of...