Joshua Lederberg

Origins and early life

Joshua Lederberg was born in Montclair, New Jersey, on 23 May 1925 into a Jewish family, the eldest son of Zvi Lederberg, an Orthodox rabbi, and of Esther Schulman, from a long line of rabbinical scholars; both had come from Palestine the year before.

Work and career

The family moved to Washington Heights in Manhattan when he was six months old; his father hoped he would follow a religious calling, and his most prized bar mitzvah present was a textbook of physiological chemistry. He finished Stuyvesant High School at fifteen, studied zoology at Columbia from 1941 and served in the Navy as a hospital corpsman while starting medical school. On leave at Yale in 1946, with Edward Tatum, he showed that the bacterium Escherichia coli can mate and exchange genes, against the belief that bacteria only divide into identical copies, and took his doctorate there in 1947.

At the University of Wisconsin, where he became an assistant professor at twenty-two, he worked with his first wife, the microbiologist Esther Zimmer, and with his student Norton Zinder discovered transduction, the transfer of genes between bacteria by a virus.

Recognition

In 1958, aged thirty-three, he received one half of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries concerning genetic recombination and the organization of the genetic material of bacteria, the other half going to George Beadle and Edward Tatum. That year he moved to Stanford to found its genetics department, urged that the Moon and planets be protected from Earth's microbes, and in the nineteen-sixties built DENDRAL with Edward Feigenbaum, the first expert system in science.

He was president of Rockefeller University from 1978 to 1990, advised the American government for forty years on science, health and security, and received the National Medal of Science in 1989. He died in New York on 2 February 2008, and in 2012 a crater on Mars was named after him.