What She Did for Love

This chapter reviews the marked asymmetry exhibited by the Lederberg collaboration. After 1958 when he won the Noble Prize, Joshua’s career took off while Esther’s sharply declined. For the awards ceremonies in Stockholm, Esther was demoted to Nobel wife. Coincidentally, 1958 was the year that Rosalind Franklin died, which disqualified her for sharing the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the DNA double helix. Franklin’s exceptional X-ray diffraction micrographs of DNA provided the critical evidence for Watson and Crick’s chemical model of DNA. In 1947, Gerty and Carl Cori were the first scientific couple to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. An exceptional complementarity distinguished the Cori relationship. More often, husband and wife collaborations are asymmetric: for six out of the seven other couples who earned one Nobel Prize, the husband alone received the award. Unlike most of their colleagues, B. O. Dodge congratulated both Lederbergs for achieving together the Nobel Prize.