Love in the Laboratory

Abstract

This chapter describes the marriage of two prodigies and how it represented a fruitful alliance of complementary research personalities: the brilliant theoretician and the skillful experimenter. Esther Zimmer and Joshua Lederberg were two of the youngest scientists to attend the 1946 summer symposium at Cold Spring Harbor. Edward Tatum arranged for his protégé, young Lederberg, to present his stupendous discovery of bacterial conjugation, showing that bacteria could mate and recombine their genes. Zimmer and Lederberg began a short romance and married five months later. The young couple moved near the campus of Yale University, where Joshua wrote up his thesis and Esther researched Neurospora genetics with Norman Giles. The following summer, Tatum negotiated with Yale to grant an accelerated PhD to Joshua. The University of Wisconsin offered him an assistant professorship, and Joshua and Esther moved to Madison in 1947. There they established the first research program in bacterial genetics.