Scientific world has lost Joshua Lederberg, University Professor and president emeritus of the Rockefeller University and a Nobel Prize winner on Saturday, February 2, at New York Presbyterian Hospital. He died from pneumonia at age 82.

In 1958, by the age of 33, Dr. Lederberg won the Nobel for Physiology or Medicine for discovering that bacteria can mate and exchange genes. He shared the prize with Edward L. Tatum and George Beadle for their discovery at Stanford in the 1940s that genes act by regulating specific chemical processes.

“Josh was one of the most creative scientists of our times. He thought more broadly and more deeply about more things than anyone, I’ve ever known. His death is a loss to all of us,” said molecular biologist Stanley N. Cohen of Stanford University quoted by the Los Angeles Times.

The son of a rabbi, Dr. Lederberg was born in Montclair, N.J. in 1925 and graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York City at the age of 15. He received his bachelor’s degree from Columbia College in 1944 and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1947. Before coming to the Rockefeller University as its fifth president in 1978, he held appointments at the University of Wisconsin and Stanford University School of Medicine. Much of his work at these two universities was performed in association with his first wife, the former Esther Miriam Zimmer, whom he met while working with Tatum. They divorced in 1966.

While president at the Rockefeller University, he recruited several excellent faculty, created the University Fellows Program, which brought outstanding young scientist to campus and constructed a major new research building. In 1990, he retired, but he returned as University Professor emeritus, the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Foundation Scholar and head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics and Informatics.

“He was a very broad ranging, open-minded, curios scientist who loved to look into new territory and find scouts who would come with him to explore. That was the pattern of his career. He was one of the great scientists of the 20^th century. I know that’s a strong statement, but it’s justified,” said David A. Hamburg, a president emeritus of the Carnegie Corporation and past president of the Institute of Medicine in Washington quoted by the New York Times.

Dr. Lederberg also involved in other fields than science, one of them being politics. He advised a total nine White House administrators, being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor by President Bush on December 15, 2006.

Dr. Lederberg began his federal advisory career in 1957, when he joined President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Science Advisory Committee, a panel of several leading scientists that worked on nuclear arms control and other security questions.

Dr. Lederberg also had an active role in the Mariner and Viking missions to Mars sponsored by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He was also a member of the boards of several foundations, including the Carnegie Corporation and the Revson Foundation and he served as chairperson of the scientific advisory board of the Ellison Medical Foundation.

He lectured widely on the relationship between science and society and served as an advisor on biological warfare to the World Health Organization.

Dr. Lederberg was fascinated by extraterrestrial life and together with physicist Dean B. Cowle, argued that astronauts and spacecraft returning to Earth should be quarantined to prevent a potentially infection by extraterrestrial germs. Both scientists argued that our own spacecraft be sterilized before launch to prevent the possible contamination of biological life on other planets. Both suggestions were very appreciated by NASA.

Dr. Lederberg helped design and build automated instruments to detect signs of life on Mars as part of NASA's 1975 Viking mission. That, in turn, led him to advocate expanding the role of computers in science. Together with Edward Feigenbaum of Stanford University developed a computer program called DENDRAL, designed to help identify unknown chemical compounds from electroscopic data. It was the first expert system for use in science.
 
He also wrote a weekly editorial column on science and society for The Washington Post called “Man and Science” between 1966 and 1971.

In 1989, he received the U.S. National Medal of Science.

His second wife, Dr. Marguerite S. Lederberg of New York; a daughter, Anne Lederberg of New York and a stepson, Davis Kirsch of Chevy Chase, Md., survives Dr. Lederberg.