Joshua Lederberg

The son of an Orthodox rabbi, Lederberg grew up in a Jewish immigrant family in New York and made his mark while still in his twenties. He discovered that bacteria, long thought to reproduce only by simple division, can exchange genetic material — a process of bacterial 'sex' called genetic recombination — reshaping the understanding of microbial heredity. This finding founded bacterial genetics and earned him the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine at age 33.