Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Esther Lederberg
Summary
Esther Miriam Zimmer Lederberg (December 18, 1922 – November 11, 2006) was an American microbiologist and a pioneer of bacterial genetics. She discovered the bacterial virus λ and the bacterial fertility factor F, devised the first implementation of replica plating, and furthered the understanding of the transfer of genes between bacteria by specialized transduction.
Lederberg also founded and directed the now-defunct Plasmid Reference Center at Stanford University, where she maintained, named, and distributed plasmids of many types, including those coding for antibiotic resistance, heavy metal resistance, virulence, conjugation, colicins, transposons, and other unknown factors.
As a woman in a male-dominated field and the wife of Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg, Esther Lederberg struggled for professional recognition. Despite her foundational discoveries in the field of microbiology, she was never offered a tenured position at a university. Textbooks often ignore her work and attribute her accomplishments to her husband.
Esther Miriam Zimmer was the first of two children born in the Bronx, New York, to a family of Orthodox Jewish background. Her parents were David Zimmer, an immigrant from Romania who ran a print shop, and Pauline Geller Zimmer. Her brother, Benjamin Zimmer, followed in 1923. Zimmer was a child of the Great Depression, and her lunch was often a piece of bread topped by the juice of a squeezed tomato. Zimmer learned Hebrew and she used this proficiency to conduct Passover seders.
Zimmer attended Evander Childs High School in the Bronx, graduating in 1938 at the age of 15. She was awarded a scholarship to attend New York City's Hunter College starting that fall. In college, Zimmer initially wanted to study French or literature, but she switched her field of study to biochemistry against the recommendation of her teachers, who felt that a woman would have more difficulty pursuing a career in the sciences. She worked as a research assistant at the New York Botanical Garden, engaging in research on Neurospora crassa with the plant pathologist Bernard Ogilvie Dodge.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.