Ester Lederberg – A Pioneer In Microbiology Community Of The Nineteen Fifties

There were two Lederbergs present in the pioneering Microbiology community of the nineteen fifties, the Nobel Prize winning Joshua Lederberg and his wife Ester Lederberg, who worked side by side with her husband in their lab, but failed to even be mentioned in Joshua’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

Ester Zimmer Lederberg was born in Bronx, New York in nineteen twenty-two and went on to attended Hunters college, where she originally majoring in French Literature. Later deciding to switch her major to Biochemistry, ignoring the council of her advisers, who told her that sciences offered few career choices for women. After completing a Bachelors degree in Biochemistry, she worked at the Carnegie Institution before moving to Northern California to attend Stanford University and work towards a master’s degree in Genetics. In 1946, after finishing her master’s degree she married Joshua Lederberg. Around the same time Joshua had gotten a professorship at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Esther accompanied her husband there and worked with him while getting her doctorate in 1950. That year she discovered phage lambda, one the many discoveries in her research career.

Esther’s discovery of lambda, one of the best known coliphages of the 1950s, was done by observing colonies in a mixed culture of E. coli K-12 along with a strain of E. coli that had been irradiated with ultra-violate light. She found that some of the colonies looked atypical, like certain segments were missing. This was due to the presence of the virus which, which was latent in E. coli K-12, and therefore went unnoticed, but caused lysis within the irradiated strain. At first many researchers believed that lambda was located in the cells cytoplasm, but through her research Esther found that was wrong. The information obtained from her experimentation suggested that lambda should be present on the certain area chromosome, at the specific location for lysogeny.

Ester’s work with lambda contributed to further discoveries by both her and other researchers, such as the transfer of genetic information between bacteria, transduction, and many mechanisms of gene regulation. Her discoveries have found multiple application in both molecular and genetic biology. With bacteria becoming increasing resistance to antibiotics and the difficulty that researchers have finding ones that replace those that lose effectiveness, phages are the center of attention in antimicrobial research. They are among the most frequently studied phages, with T coliphages and lambda serving as crucial models in the advancement of microbiology.

Esters early research with lambda and subsequent assistance at her husband’s laboratory at Stanford helped advance her husband’s research in bacterial conjugation, for which he won the nineteen fifty-eight Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. Ester was never mentioned in his acceptance speech or given more than mentioning credit in work she partner with. They divorced in nineteen sixty-eight.