better late -- Joshua Lederberg, a great man and a long time IPer died

[DAVID FARBER <dave () farber net>]

Joshua Lederberg, 82, pioneer in bacteria science
By William J. Broad
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
NEW YORK: Joshua Lederberg, one of the 20th century's leading  
scientists, whose work in bacterial genetics had vast medical  
implications and led to his receiving a Nobel Prize in 1958, died on  
Saturday. He was 82.

Rockefeller University, where Lederberg was university professor and  
president emeritus, announced his death Monday, saying the cause was  
pneumonia.

A prodigy as a youth, Lederberg was 33 when he was awarded the Nobel  
for Physiology or Medicine for discovering that bacteria can mate and  
exchange genes. He was one of the youngest Nobel laureates, sharing  
the 1958 prize with Edward Tatum and George Beadle for their discovery  
at Stanford in the 1940s that genes act by regulating specific  
chemical processes.

Lederberg's discovery that bacteria engage in sex created new  
understandings of how bacteria evolve and acquire new traits,  
including resistance to antibiotic drugs. A founder of the field of  
molecular biology, he helped lay the foundations for many biological  
revolutions, including biotechnology.

Lederberg moved in diverse worlds. A brilliant analyst and visionary,  
he led early inquiries into the possibility of computer intelligence,  
theorized about alien life in distant galaxies and advised American  
presidents for a half century. He also wrote a weekly newspaper  
column, "Science and Man." His ideas were often decades ahead of the  
conventional wisdom.

He was also a dedicated educator, working in administrative posts at  
the University of Wisconsin, as well as at Stanford and Rockefeller  
and taking an interest in helping and developing young scientists.

"He was a very broad-ranging, open-minded, curious scientist who loved  
to look into new territory and find scouts who would come with him to  
explore," said David Hamburg, a president emeritus of the Carnegie  
Corp. and past president of the Institute of Medicine in Washington.  
"That was the pattern of his career.

"He was one of the great scientists of the 20th century. I know that's  
a strong statement, but it's justified."

Donald Kennedy, the editor of Science magazine in Washington and a  
former colleague of Lederberg's at Stanford, said that on Lederberg's  
arrival at the school nearly a half century ago, "he was already a  
hero, the most important founder of bacterial genetics and  
microbiology."

Lederberg was born May 23, 1925, in Montclair, New Jersey, to Zvi  
Hirsch Lederberg, a rabbi, and the former Esther Goldenbaum, who had  
emigrated from what is now Israel two years earlier. His family moved  
to New York when he was 6 months old.

After graduating from Stuyvesant High School in New York in 1941 at  
15, he went to Columbia and studied zoology, receiving a bachelor's  
with honors at 19. He then went to medical school at the College of  
Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia.

In 1943, he enrolled in a special navy medical training program,  
working at St. Albans Naval Hospital in Queens County, New York,  
examining servicemen returning from the Pacific for parasites that  
cause malaria.

After two years in medical school, in the summer of 1944, Lederberg  
transferred to Yale and helped pioneer the field of bacterial  
genetics. He received his doctorate at Yale in 1947.

At the time, scientists believed that bacteria reproduced asexually by  
dividing into genetically identical halves. But Lederberg found that  
bacteria possessed a genetic mechanism, called recombination, similar  
to that of higher organisms, including humans.

It began with the transmission of genes from one bacterium to another.

Lederberg left Yale in 1947 for the University of Wisconsin, where he  
continued to study bacterial genetics. He broke administrative ground  
by founding the department of medical genetics, helping doctors  
modernize their often outdated approach to disease.

At Wisconsin, he also helped prove that genetic mutations occurred  
spontaneously, confirming a long-held belief of evolutionary studies.  
Lederberg was elected to membership in the National Academy of  
Sciences in 1957 and was made a charter member of its Institute of  
Medicine.

In 1959, he joined the Stanford School of Medicine, where he was  
chairman of the department of genetics and was a professor of biology  
and computer science, working on research in artificial intelligence,  
biochemistry and medicine.

In 1978, he moved to Rockefeller as its fifth president, serving until  
June 1990.

Regularly shuttling to Washington throughout his life, Lederberg  
advised a total of nine White House administrations, according to  
Rockefeller University. On Dec. 15, 2006, in a White House ceremony,  
President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of  
Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

Lederberg began his federal advisory career in 1957, when he joined  
President Dwight Eisenhower's Science Advisory Committee, a panel of  
several leading scientists. The panel worked on nuclear arms control  
and other security questions.

From 1966 to 1971, Lederberg wrote a weekly column for The Washington  
Post, commenting on science education, scientists' role in society and  
divisive topics like population control, intelligence testing and  
regulating recombinant DNA technology.

Something of a wordsmith, Lederberg coined the term exobiology, or the  
study of the possibility of alien life. He collaborated with the  
astronomer Carl Sagan in establishing exobiology as a scientific  
discipline and in educating the public on the biological implications  
of space exploration.

With the dawn of the space age, his warnings about interstellar  
contamination and his call for the scientific study of life beyond  
Earth's atmosphere tapped into popular fascination and brought him  
international attention.

One account holds that Lederberg argued that the first astronauts  
returning from the Moon should spend weeks in quarantine - earning  
their fury - because of his worry that they might inadvertently import  
alien microbes.

Surviving are his wife, Dr. Marguerite Lederberg; two children, Anne,  
of New York, and David Kirsch, of Chevy Chase, Maryland; and two  
grandchildren.


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