HOWZAT

At Stanford, Lederberg continued his research in bacterial genetics. As director of Stanford’s Joseph P. Kennedy Junior Laboratories for Molecular Medicine he also began investigations into the genetic and neurological basis of mental retardation.

In 1978 he was appointed President of Rockefeller University in New York City, a graduate institution specialising in biomedical research. In 1990 he became Professor Emeritus and Raymond and Beverley Sackler Foundation Scholar at Rockefeller, continuing both laboratory research on bacterial and human genetics, and advising the US Government and industry on global health policy.

He became particularly concerned about the threat of bioterrorism. After terrorists set off massive explosions at a federal building in Oklahoma City and at the World Trade Centre in the 1990s he gave warning of the danger that future terrorists would add biological agents in their attacks. Visualise these attacks “complicated by inclusion of a kilogram of anthrax spores as a kind of microbiological shrapnel along with the explosives,” he said. “Imagine its implications for salvage and rescue, public health, panic.”

Lederberg was very interested in the relationship between science and public policy and he contributed much to America’s public policy. He served for many years on the Pentagon’s Defence Science Board. He was a member of various panels of the President’s Science Advisory Committee between 1950 and 1998; a member of President Kennedy’s Panel on Mental Retardation, 1961-62; a consultant to the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during negotiations for the Biological Weapons Convention at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva between 1969 and 1972; an adviser to President Carter on cancer research as chairman of the President’s Cancer Panel, 1979-81; and a member of Pentagon’s Defence Science Board, on which he had served since 1979.

Lederberg published more than 300 scientific articles and edited several books, including Papers in Microbial Genetics: Bacteria and Bacterial Viruses (1951), Emerging Infections: Microbial Threats to Health in the United States (1992), and Biological Weapons: Limiting the Threat (1999).

Lederberg was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1957, a foreign member of the Royal Society in 1979, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1982. He received the US National Medal of Science in 1989, and the Allen Newell Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1995, among many other honours.

He said he was guided throughout his long career by “an unswerving interest in science, as the means by which man could strive for an understanding of his origin, setting and purpose, and for power to forestall his natural fate of hunger, disease and death”.

Lederberg’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1966. In 1968 he married again. He had a son and a daughter with his second wife.

Professor Joshua Lederberg, scientist, was born on May 23, 1925. He died on February 2, 2008, aged 82