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Family Life (Ferrell 2018; Schaechter 2016)
Family Life (Ferrell 2018; Schaechter 2016)
Esther Miriam Zimmer was born on December 18, 1922 to David and Pauline Zimmer at the Bronx Maternity Hospital in the Bronx, New York. Esther was the eldest of two children, her brother Benjamin was born in 1925. Her mother, Pauline, was born in New York City to parents from Romania and Galatia, and her father, David, was born in Romania and was Jewish. Her family was poor and her father ran a print shop. However, Esther was a voracious learner and took the time to learn Hebrew from her grandfather. She did not let her poor upbringing in the Bronx limit her potential to become a scientist.
Esther at age 15, shortly before her high school graduation in 1938 (Ferrell 2018).
Academia & Career (Ferrell 2018; Schaechter 2016)
Academia & Career (Ferrell 2018; Schaechter 2016)
Esther graduated from New York's Evander Childs High School in June 1938 and won a scholarship to study at Hunter College in New York City that fall. Because she was female, Esther faced societal pressure to study language or literature, however, she did not succumb to the pressure and chose to study biochemistry instead. During her time at Hunter, Esther worked on the mold Neurospora under Bernard Ogilvie Dodge's supervision at the New York Botanical Garden. He said she was "a very bright young girl" and warranted a fellowship. Esther graduated cum laude (with honour) from Hunter College in June 1942. She went on to work in the U.S. Public Health Service's Industrial Hygiene Research Laboratory where she exposed Neurospora spores to ultraviolet radiation and analyzed the resulting mutants. Associates at the Industrial Hygiene lab wrote reference letters for Esther and she was accepted into a master's program at Stanford University.
As a master's student, Esther became Edward Tatum's teaching assistant; he introduced Esther to the world of genetics. Tatum and George Beadle were researching mutations in Neurospora, and Esther's research consisted of analyzing one of their Neurospora mutants. Her life as a master's student was not easy, she did the household laundry in exchange for a room in a house, and she was so poor that she and another teaching assistant often ate the frogs' legs after student dissections. Nonetheless, in August 1946, Esther submitted her Master of Arts thesis called "Mutant Strains of Neurospora Deficient in Para-Aminobenzoic Acid”, earning her Master's in Genetics from Stanford University.
Starting in July 1946, Esther and her future husband, Joshua Lederberg, had begun corresponding with one another through letters, discussing a certain Neurospora strain. Shortly after completing her masters, Esther moved to Yale's Osborn Botanical Laboratory in New Haven, Connecticut where Joshua was. Esther worked with Norman Giles on mechanisms of reversion in Neurospora. Four short months later, on December 13, 1946, Esther (age 23) and Joshua (age 21) were married in New Haven. They spent their "honeymoon" at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston, Massachusetts later that December.
Joshua completed his Ph.D. at Yale University in the summer of 1947, and at the age of 22, he accepted a job as assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin (UW) in Madison, researching bacterial genetics. Esther was still working at the Osborn Lab during Joshua's completion of his Ph.D. She turned down a tuition grant to study botany at Columbia University so she could move to Madison with him.
Anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant sentiments were widespread in the United States during this time. Joshua's parents were from Israel and he came from a long line of rabbis and, as mentioned earlier, Esther's father was Jewish. R.A. Brink supported them both, he helped Joshua get hired at UW, and he made Esther's next steps in science possible. She did her doctoral work under Brink's sponsorship. Esther received fellowships from the University of Wisconsin and the National Cancer Institute, and in 1950, she completed her dissertation "Genetic Control of Mutability in the Bacterium Escherichia coli", earning her doctorate.
Joshua had advised Esther to delay her work on her recently discovered bacteriophage lambda (λ) and on F (conjugation's fertility factor) because he thought finishing her thesis work was the priority. It is evident that Joshua attempted to dictate Esther's life. Esther's lambda discovery was written in Microbial Genetics Bulletin, an informal publication, and in 1951, she published a short abstract on lambda. In the summer of 1951, Esther and Joshua submitted a paper on the indirect selection of mutants, in which replica plating was introduced as a means to pick up bacterial colonies and innoculate them onto plates of different media.
In May 1952, Esther and Joshua submitted, for publication, a detailed account of crosses between Esther's Escherichia coli K-12 strains that were lysogenic for the phage (now referred to as λ) and mutant strains from Tatum (Esther and Joshua's former instructor/supervisor) and Joshua's work that were sensitive to λ lysis. They report on complex cross-streaking experiments testing approximately 2,000 strains of E. coli for λ lysogeny and sensitivity, these were likely carried out by Esther since she was the noted experimentalist of the group. The Lederberg lab made many other remarkable discoveries in 1952, including generalized transduction in Salmonella. An article concerning Esther's discovery of fertility factor F was finally published in 1952, with Joshua and Luigi Cavalli. Esther was also the sole author of a 1952 paper reporting experiments with lactose metabolism genes. 1952 was a busy year for the Lederbergs.
In 1956, Esther, Joshua and Larry Morse reported transduction by λ phage in the sexually fertile K-12 strain of E. coli that had been previously described by Esther. In 1958, Esther gave a talk on fine-structure mapping of the Gal gene region in E. coli at the 10th International Congress of Genetics in Montreal, Quebec.
The 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Joshua, Beadle and Tatum. Esther's scientific work was interwoven with the winners', but her contributions were hardly acknowledged. She was nothing but a laureate's wife in Stockholm at the ceremony. This is further explored in the 'Marginalization' section of the website. Esther was barely 5'3" and was unwilling to spend time and money on an evening gown for the Nobel Prize ceremony, so she bought a teenager's prom dress and hand-dyed shoes to match.
At this time, in 1958, Joshua became chair of the new Department of Genetics at Stanford University, and Esther joined the Department of Medical Microbiology. Despite her qualifications, Esther had to plead with Stanford's dean to hire her as a mere "research professor" without tenure.
Esther and Joshua published their last paper together in 1964 and divorced in 1966. Esther continued at Stanford but was never tenured; she even had to fight to retain her position at Stanford in 1974. Nonetheless, Esther continued collaborating, working with Stanley Cohen on transforming Salmonella with plasmid DNA. In 1976, she became the director of the Plasmid Reference Center. She retired in 1985, but remained at the plasmid center for a time.
Interests (Ferrell 2018; Schaechter 2016)
Interests (Ferrell 2018; Schaechter 2016)
Besides science, Esther also had a love and passion for music. This led her to become one of the founders of the Mid Peninsula Recorder Orchestra in 1962, where she played the recorder and continued to attend rehearsals and concerts in her later years. In 1989, an engineer named Matthew Simon arrived at Stanford. He asked at a meeting if anyone knew about early music, Esther struck up a conversation with him and the rest was history. The two were married in 1993 and were together for the rest of Esther's life, sharing a love of music, botany, and literature.
Esther passed away on November 11, 2006, at the age of 83, at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, California from pneumonia and congestive heart failure (Ferrell 2018; Schaechter 2016). Esther's contributions to biology were exceptional and will not soon be forgotten by those who take the time to learn her story. May Esther Lederberg rest in peace.
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