Lasting Memories

Esther Miriam Zimmer Lederberg
Dec. 18, 1922-Nov. 11, 2006
St, California

Esther Miriam Zimmer Lederberg, professor emeritus of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University, died Nov. 11 at Stanford Hospital of pneumonia and congestive heart failure. She was 83.

Her studies over more than 50 years helped lead to some fundamental discoveries in microbial genetics.

"She was one of the great pioneers in bacterial genetics," said Stanley Flakow, a professor in cancer research. "Experimentally and methodologically she was a genius in the lab."

She collaborated with her first husband, Joshua Lederberg, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1958 for his work on how bacteria swapped genes.

Her work was noteworthy on its own and she was a trailblazer for women scientists at Stanford. "She was a real legend," said Dr. Lucy Tompkins, professor of microbiology and immunology, and of medicine.

Lederberg was born in the Bronx on Dec. 18, 1922. She earned a bachelor's degree from Hunter College of City University of New York in 1942 and then moved to Stanford to study genetics. She received her master's degree from Stanford in 1946. She married Joshua Lederberg the same year.

She studied microbiology at Stanford's Marine Hopkins Station in Monterey and then went to the University of Wisconsin, where she earned her doctorate in 1950. She returned to Stanford as a faculty member in the School of Medicine in 1959 and Joshua Lederberg became the chairman of the newly created department of genetics. They divorced in 1966.

Her second husband, Matthew Simon, noted how Lederberg had to petition the dean of the medical school for a position in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology because there were few women on the Stanford faculty at the time. She retired from teaching in 1985. She had a strong interest in early music, forming the Mid-Peninsula Recorder Orchestra in 1962. Through their common interest in early music, she met and married Matthew Simon.

She is survived by him and a brother, Benjamin Zimmer.