LEDERBERG, JOSHUA

LEDERBERG, JOSHUA (1925– ), U.S. geneticist. Born in Montclair, New Jersey and scion of a rabbinical family from Ereẓ Israel, he studied at Columbia University and then at Yale and made a number of important discoveries in microbial genetics. It had previously been thought that bacteria reproduced only asexually. In 1946, however, Lederberg and Edward L. Tatum discovered that sexual union and genetic recombination occur in Escherischia coli, the common colon bacterium. In 1952, while looking for evidence of sexuality in other bacterial forms, Lederberg and a student, Norton Zinder, demonstrated that certain viruses are capable of transmitting genetic material from one bacterial cell to another, a process they named transduction. From 1947 to 1959 Lederberg was professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin. In 1959 he became professor and chairman of the department of genetics at Stanford University. For his studies on the organization of the genetic material in bacteria Lederberg (with Tatum) was co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1958. In 1978 he left Stanford to assume the presidency of Rockefeller University, serving in that capacity until 1990. He continued his research there on the genetics of bacterial growth as a Raymond and Beverly Sackler Foundation Scholar. Lederberg's research interests, in addition to microbial genetics, are the chemical origin and evolution of life, space biology, and the augmentation of human intelligence with computer software. Speaking out on policy issues, he has drawn attention to the ever-present threat of new infectious diseases and the impetus these may receive from human folly. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: T. Levitan, Laureates… (1960), 176–9; Current Biography Yearbook 1959 (1960), 251–2; S.R. Riedman and E.T. Gustafson, Portraits of Nobel Laureates in Medicine and Physiology (1963), 318–20. (Fred Rosner)