1925-

American Geneticist and Microbiologist

In 1958 Joshua Lederberg shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine with George Wells Beadle (1903-1989) and Edward Lawrie Tatum (1909-1975) for his discovery of sexual reproduction and genetic recombination in bacteria. This work was fundamental to overcoming skepticism about the value of microbes as model systems for research in genetics. Previously, some classical geneticists had dismissed the possibility of using bacteria because these simple organisms were thought to have "no genes, nuclei, or sex." Lederberg and Edward Tatum announced their discovery on the sex life of bacteria at the 1946 Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Microbial Genetics. This announcement convinced many biologists that, like the traditional subjects of genetic research, bacteria had chromosomes and mutable genes that could undergo recombination and replication processes. New approaches to studying the nature of the gene in bacteria and viruses led to the establishment of molecular genetics...