Esther Lederberg - Early Years

Early Years

Esther Miriam Zimmer was the first of two children born in the Bronx, New York, to David Zimmer and Pauline Geller Zimmer. Her brother, Benjamin Zimmer, followed in 1923. A child of the Great Depression, her lunch was often a piece of bread topped by the juice of a squeezed tomato.

Zimmer thrived academically. She attended Evander Childs High School in the Bronx, receiving honors for French and graduating at the age of 16. As an undergraduate, Zimmer worked at the New York Botanical Garden, engaging in research on Neurospora crassa with Bernard Ogilvie Dodge. She received an A.B. at New York City’s Hunter College, graduating cum laude in 1942, at the age of 20.

After her graduation from Hunter, Zimmer went to work as a research assistant to Alexander Hollaender at the Carnegie Institution of Washington (later Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory), where she continued to work with N. crassa as well as publishing her first work in genetics. In 1944 she won a fellowship to Stanford University, working as an assistant to George Wells Beadle. She traveled west to California, and after a summer studying at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station under Cornelius Van Niel, she entered a master’s program in genetics. While at Stanford she worked with Edward Tatum of Yale on bacterial genetics. Stanford awarded her a Master of Arts in 1946.

She married Joshua Lederberg on December 13, 1946, after which she began work on her doctorate at the University of Wisconsin. Her thesis was "Genetic control of mutability in the bacterium Escherichia coli." Joshua Lederberg accepted a position there as Associate Professor. She completed her doctorate under the sponsorship of R. A. Brink, in 1950, the same year that she discovered the lysogenicity of lambda bacteriophage (see below).