25 Facts About Esther Lederberg

Esther Miriam Zimmer Lederberg was an American microbiologist and a pioneer of bacterial genetics.

Esther Lederberg discovered the bacterial virus lambda phage and the bacterial fertility factor F, devised the first implementation of replica plating, and furthered the understanding of the transfer of genes between bacteria by specialized transduction.

Esther Lederberg Miriam Zimmer was the first of two children born in the Bronx, New York, to a family of Orthodox Jewish background.

Esther Lederberg's parents were David Zimmer, an immigrant from Romania who ran a print shop, and Pauline Geller Zimmer.

Esther Lederberg was awarded a scholarship to attend New York City's Hunter College starting that fall.

Esther Lederberg worked as a research assistant at the New York Botanical Garden, engaging in research on Neurospora crassa with the plant pathologist Bernard Ogilvie Dodge.

Esther Lederberg later traveled west to California, and after a summer studying at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station under Cornelius Van Niel, she entered a master's program in genetics.

Esther Lederberg moved to Yale's Osborn Botanical Laboratory and then to the University of Wisconsin after her husband became a professor there.

Esther Lederberg remained at the University of Wisconsin for most of the 1950s.

Esther Lederberg initially reported the discovery in 1951 while she was a PhD student and later provided a detailed description in a 1953 paper in the journal Genetics.

Esther Lederberg was working with an E coli K12 strain that had been mutagenized with ultraviolet light.

Biographer Rebecca Ferrell believes that the method Esther Lederberg invented was likely inspired by using her father's press at his work, pressing a plate of bacterial colonies onto sterile velvet, after which they were stamped onto plates of media with different ingredients, depending on the desired traits the researcher wished to observed.

Esther Lederberg returned to Stanford in 1959 with Joshua Lederberg.

Esther Lederberg remained at Stanford for the balance of her research career, directing the Plasmid Reference Center at the Stanford School of Medicine from 1976 to 1986.

Esther Lederberg initiated the system of naming insertion sequences and transposons sequentially beginning with IS1 and Tn1.

Esther Lederberg retired from her position in the Stanford Department of Microbiology and Immunology in 1985, but continued her work at the PRC as a volunteer.

The lack of credit Esther Lederberg is given for development of the replica plating technique has been cited as an example of the Matilda effect, in which discoveries made by women scientists are unfairly attributed to their male colleagues.

Esther Lederberg was excluded from writing a chapter in the 1966 book Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology, a commemoration of molecular biology.

Esther Lederberg was an advocate for herself and other women during the early years of feminism's second wave.

Esther Lederberg was eventually appointed a faculty position as research associate professor in the department of microbiology and immunology, but the position was untenured.

Esther Lederberg played the recorder and in 1962 founded the Mid-Peninsula Recorder Orchestra, which plays compositions from the 13th century to the present.

Esther Lederberg loved the works of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen.

Esther Lederberg belonged to societies devoted to studying and celebrating these two authors, the Dickens Society of Palo Alto and the Jane Austen Society.

Esther Lederberg married Joshua Lederberg in 1946; they divorced in 1968.

Esther Lederberg died in Stanford, California, on November 11,2006, from pneumonia and congestive heart failure at the age of 83.