Allan Charles Wilson FRS AAA&S (18 October 1934 – 21 July 1991) was a professor of biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, a pioneer in the use of molecular approaches to understand evolutionary change and reconstruct phylogenies, and a revolutionary contributor to the study of human evolution.

[2][3] Allan Wilson was born in Ngāruawāhia, New Zealand, and raised on his family's rural dairy farm at Helvetia, Pukekohe, about twenty miles south of Auckland.

The bird physiologist Donald S. Farner met Wilson as an undergraduate at Otago and invited him to Washington State University at Pullman as his graduate student.

Instead, Wilson remained in the United States, gaining his PhD at Berkeley in 1961 under the direction of biochemist Arthur Pardee for work on the regulation of flavin biosynthesis in bacteria.

[10][11][12] Nate Kaplan was one of the very earliest pioneers to address phylogenetic problems with evidence from protein molecules,[13][14] an approach that Wilson later famously applied to human evolution and primate relationships.

[19] Wilson and another PhD student Mary-Claire King subsequently compared several lines of genetic evidence (immunology, amino acid differences, and protein electrophoresis) on the divergence of humans and chimpanzees, and showed that all methods agreed that the two species were >99% similar.

In the early 1980s, Wilson further disturbed and refined traditional anthropological thinking by his work with PhD students Rebecca Cann and Mark Stoneking on the so-called "Mitochondrial Eve" hypothesis.

[21] In his efforts to identify informative genetic markers for tracking human evolutionary history, he focused on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) – genes that are found in mitochondria organelles in the cytoplasm of the cell outside the nucleus.

Because of its location in the cytoplasm, mtDNA is passed exclusively from mother to child, the father making no contribution, and in the absence of genetic recombination defines female lineages over evolutionary timescales.

[4][15] Wilson became ill with leukaemia, and after a bone marrow transplant, died on Sunday, 21 July 1991, at the Fred Hutchinson Memorial Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

He trained scores of undergraduate, graduate (17 women and 17 men received their doctoral degrees in his lab), and post-doctoral students in molecular evolutionary biology, including sabbatical visitors from six continents.