The Scientific Autobiography of Thomas Cavalier-Smith FRS, FRSC

21 October 1942 — 19 March 2021

Foreword by Ema Cavalier-Smith

Time was not on Thomas Cavalier-Smith's side when he endeavoured to write his autobiography, as required, for The Royal Society. In his familiar comprehensive manner, he shares with you in some detail about how his keen interest in natural history from an early age led him to subsequently focus on evolutionary biology for his professional life. Sadly, Thomas was able to write about only half of his scientific life before terminal illness struck and left us with an unfinished autobiography. Thomas began writing his biography on 21 March 2020 and the last entry was made on 18 December 2020 as indicated on his laptop, almost precisely three months before he passed away on 19 March 2021. Gáspár Jékely has kindly edited and referenced the unfinished work for making it available to the public. 

Editorial notes by Gáspár Jékely 

The referencing of the Autobiography was based on the in-text citations manually inserted by Thomas (e.g. C-S 1981). However, a reference list was missing from the document. I made every effort to find the matching paper and managed to do it for most citations. I also left Thomas's original citations in the text. Sometimes there is a mismatch between the date that Thomas inserted and the paper he most likely intended to cite. If the mismatch was only a few years, I left the citation unchanged. In a few cases, however, there was a mismatch of exactly ten years which I interpreted as a typo and corrected. The text was also edited for typos and in a few places for clarity. Species names were not italicised by Thomas and were left unchanged. I am thankful to Ema Cavalier-Smith for sharing the Autobiography with me already in 2021, when I was asked by the Royal Society to write a Biographic Memoir of Thomas (only completed in 2026). The text is provided in different formats within the same Zenodo repository (pdf, docx and html).