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Joshua LederbergAmerican geneticist
Date of Birth: 23.05.1925
Country:  USA |
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Biography of Joshua Lederberg
Joshua Lederberg (born May 23, 1925) is an American geneticist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1958. He shared the prize with Edward Tatum and George Beadle for their discoveries concerning genetic recombination and the organization of genetic material in bacteria.
Lederberg was born in Montclair, New Jersey. He graduated from Columbia University in 1944 and Yale University in 1948. He worked at the University of Wisconsin from 1948 to 1958 and became a professor at Stanford University in 1958.
Research on Bacterial Recombination
Lederberg's main scientific work focused on the study of mechanisms of recombination in bacteria. In 1946, he and Tatum demonstrated that when mutant strains of E. coli, unable to grow on minimal media, were cultured together, cells that could successfully replicate on such media and exhibited characteristics of both parental types were produced. This work led to the discovery of one type of bacterial recombination called conjugation.
In 1952, Lederberg and Norton Zinder discovered the phenomenon of transduction, which involves the transfer of genetic information from a donor bacterium to a recipient bacterium by a temperate bacteriophage. In 1953, they demonstrated transduction in Salmonella. These experiments laid the foundation for gene mapping studies.
