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College of Agricultural and Life Sciences |
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Pioneering Bacterial Genetics |
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Geneticist Joshua Lederberg was the first University of Wisconsin faculty member to receive the Nobel Prize. His discovery of conjugation in bacterial cells was a milestone in biology and ushered in the new field of bacterial genetics. Soon, the genetics of the bacterium Escherichia coli became better understood than the genetics of all other organisms. Lederberg also discovered, with graduate student Norton Zinder, that a virus can carry genes from one bacterium to another through a process called "transduction." A man of wide knowledge and many scholarly interests, Lederberg later became president of Rockefeller University. |
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This historic marker is made possible by a grant from the UW Foundation. |
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