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Joshua Lederberg, 1925.
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Joshua Lederberg using a microtome to cut tissue sections, 1941.
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Lederberg in his naval reserves uniform, 1943.
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Lederberg at work in lab at the University of Wisconsin, 1958.
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Telegram telling Lederberg that he will share in the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.
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1958 Nobel Prize winners: (L-R) George Beadle, Edward Tatum (Physiology or Medicine), I. Tamm (Physics), F. Sanger (Chemistry), P. Cherenkov (Physics), I. Frank (Physics), Joshua Lederberg (Physiology or Medicine).
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Lederberg's 1958 Nobel Prize medal.
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Lederberg's 1958 Nobel Prize certificate.
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1951 Cold Spring Harbor Symposium, (L-R): E. B. Lewis, C. C. Lindegren, Alfred Hershey and Joshua Lederberg.
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Joshua Lederberg in his office at the Rockefeller Institute, 1999.
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Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase at Cold Spring Harbor, 1953.
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Martha Epstein Chase.
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Relaxing during a break at the 1953 Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Viruses: (L-R) Raymond Appleyard, George Bowen, Martha Chase, June Dixon.
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Alfred Hershey receiving the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
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Alfred Hershey and his son, Peter, at the Nobel Prize ceremonies.
Audio Glossary
Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), Gene, Gene mapping, Genome, Inherited, VectorVideo Interviews
Joshua Lederberg is a Professor Emeritus at Rockefeller University, where his current research addresses DNA conformation and evolutionary acceleration.
Clip 1 (0:54)
How his reading of the Avery, McCarty & McLeod paper motivated him to begin research into understanding the chemical nature of the gene.
Clip 2 (0:50)
Designing the experiments that uncovered bacterial conjugation: theory-driven versus data-driven experiments.
Clip 3 (0:52)
Expectations on whether the Neurospora experiments would work and what results they might show.
Clip 4 (1:00)
The Nobel moment: how he was informed that he had won the Nobel prize.
Clip 5 (1:19)
The attributes of great scientists.
Al Hershey spent 47 years at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Hershey was best known for his work, with Martha Chase, that showed that genes were made of DNA. Al Hershey passed away on May 22, 1997.
Clip 1 (1:00)
In this interview from 1991, Al Hershey describes the experimental approach used in the famous "blender experiment."
Joshua Lederberg discovered bacterial recombination and started a new field of research. Alfred Hershey was a phage geneticist who, with his research assistant, Martha Chase, did one of the most famous experiments in molecular biology. The "blender" experiment proved that DNA carried genetic information. JOSHUA LEDERBERG (1925-)
Joshua Lederberg was born in Montclair, New Jersey, and as he said in a 1998 interview, he must have been born a scientist. Lederberg showed an early aptitude and interest in science. In 1941, after high school, he entered Columbia University with the intention of studying medicine. At Columbia, Lederberg became interested in Beadle and Tatum's Neurospora experiments, which opened up new and exciting research possibilities especially in the fledgling field of genetic analysis. In 1943, Lederberg got a job as a media-prep gopher in Frances Ryan's lab in the Department of Zoology. Ryan was a post-doc at Stanford in 1941-42, where he met Beadle and Tatum and became interested in using Neurospora as a research model. Ryan's mentorship and discussions with other faculty members and graduate students, "nourished [Lederberg's] education as a scientist." Lederberg found that scientific research was more intellectually challenging than the textbook drills of medical school. From 1943-1944, Lederberg had a year of active duty in the United States Naval Reserves where he worked in a clinical parasitology laboratory at the U. S. Naval Hospital on Long Island, New York. He did not see active service, and although he was expected to return to medical school, at the end of 1944 Lederberg was back working in Ryan's lab. 1944 was the year Oswald Avery and his group published their paper on the transforming ability of DNA. Lederberg was profoundly influenced by the paper and its unlimited implications. He and Ryan immediately tried doing similar experiments using Neurospora. Unfortunately, they were unable to get the necessary mutants. Lederberg started to think about using a bacterial system even though there was still debate about whether bacteria had genes or not. An opportunity came to test his ideas. Edward Tatum was moving from Stanford to Yale to start a new microbiology lab. Ryan encouraged Lederberg to apply to work in Tatum's lab and Lederberg was accepted in 1946. Tatum already had some E. coli mutants that were suitable for the kind of experiment Lederberg outlined. Within six weeks, Lederberg had the results he needed to prove bacterial conjugation occurred. For this work, Lederberg shared the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Edward Tatum and George Beadle. After obtaining a Ph.D. from Yale in 1948, Lederberg accepted a job at the University of Wisconsin. It was at Wisconsin that Lederberg developed the technique of bacterial replica plating in which bacterial colonies can be duplicated onto filters for further analysis. Lederberg also helped create and later served as the chair of the Department of Medical Genetics. In 1958, Lederberg left Wisconsin for the Department of Genetics at Stanford University's School of Medicine. At Stanford, in addition to his own bacterial research, Lederberg had two other interests. One was artificial intelligence; Lederberg helped develop one of the first computer systems (DENDRAL) that could make decisions using a specific set of algorithms and a database. Lederberg's other interest was exobiology. He was an active consultant on the Space Science Board of the National Academy of Sciences, and was greatly interested in the Mariner and Viking missions as well as the search for extraterrestial life. In 1978, he was appointed President of Rockefeller University - the site of Oswald Avery's Pneumococcus research. Since 1990, Lederberg has been Professor Emeritus of Rockefeller University. He serves on a number of government advisory boards and has written a weekly column Science and Man for the Washington Post where he informed the public on issues in science and research. Lederberg's latest project is to compile an informational web site at the National Library of Medicine using archival material he has accumulated over the years. ALFRED DAY HERSHEY (1908-1997)
Alfred Hershey was born in Owosso, Michigan. He graduated from Michigan State in 1930 with a B.S., and in 1934 with a Ph.D. After his Ph.D., Hershey accepted a position at the Washington University School of Medicine in the Department of Bacteriology, where he started working on bacteriophage. At the time, there weren't many people working on bacteriophage. Two other scientists who read Hershey's papers, Max Delbrück and Salvador Luria, were collaborating on experiments using bacteriophage. In 1943, Delbrück invited Hershey to Nashville to visit his lab. In 1946, working with Delbruck, Hershey discovered that phage can recombine when co-infected into a bacteria host. This led to a new area of phage genetics. As leading researchers in the field of bacteriophage, Delbrück, Luria, and Hershey established the American Phage Group which had a tremendous influence on bacteriophage research. Hershey stayed at the Washington University School of Medicine until 1950. He then accepted a position from the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Genetics at Cold Spring Harbor. Here he and Martha Chase did the Hershey-Chase blender experiment that proved that phage DNA, and not protein, was the genetic material. For this, and his body of work on bacteriophage, Hershey shared the 1969 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Max Delbrück and Salvador Luria. In 1962, Hershey became the Director of the Genetics Research Unit at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. His lab continued to work on bacteriophage, focusing on phage recombination and genetics. In 1974, Hershey retired, though he was still a regular visitor to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. In 1979, a building on the grounds was dedicated to him. Hershey was known to be an excellent writer and editor. His papers were clear and concise and he helped other scientists learn the craft of scientific writing. He enjoyed gardening and woodworking, as well as classical music. In the early 80s, he became interested in computers and used them to catalog his classical music collection. He was busy, active, and still learning even in retirement. | |
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LinksThe Big Picture Book of VirusesOn this site there are lots of pictures of viruses. There are also links to other web pages with information on viruses. Prokaryotes, Eukaryotes, & Viruses TutorialThis tutorial is from The Biology Project and is a good overview of the differences between prokaryotes, eukaryotes and viruses. Profiles in ScienceFrom the National Institutes of Health, this site has a very extensive collection of material on Joshua Lederberg. The material was donated by Dr. Lederberg. Bibliography
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