Joshua Lederberg was born into a family of religion, but always felt the pull of science. The son of an Orthodox rabbi father and a mother whose family included rabbinical scholars, Lederberg announced at age 7 that he would be “like Einstein.”
He became an influential molecular biologist, winning the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1958 with colleagues Edward L. Tatum and George W. Beadle. Lederberg was honored for his discovery that bacteria transfer their genes from pair to pair through a mating process. His findings shook the accepted notion that bacteria reproduce by dividing themselves into identical halves.
Lederberg, founder and former chair of the department of genetics at Stanford, died February 2. He was 82.
Lederberg was born in Montclair, N.J., and graduated from Columbia University at 19. At 22, he received his doctorate from Yale. His diverse interests led him to develop spacecraft equipment for NASA, study the consequences of nuclear warfare, write weekly columns about science and public issues for the Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, and hold positions at Stanford, the U. of Wisconsin and Rockefeller U. He served as a consultant for Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation.
Lederberg spent nearly 20 years on Stanford's faculty, starting as chair of the genetics department. He accepted Stanford's offer in 1958, days before he learned about the Nobel Prize. He was just 33 years old, and would later describe the accomplishment as “a shock, a total surprise.”
He was a Time man of the year in 1960 and received the National Medal of Science and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Lederberg is survived by his second wife, Marguerite S. Lederberg, a psychiatrist in New York; their daughter, Anne; and his stepson, David Kirsch, PhD '97.
