March 25, 2002

Nobel Prize-winner and research geneticist Joshua Lederberg will speak at the Stamford campus on Thursday, April 11. Lederberg's lecture, "Bioterrorism and Civility," is part of the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Distinguished Lecture Series.

Lederberg is best known for discovering genetic recombination in bacteria. Because of their simple structure and rapid growth, bacteria have afforded geneticists a fruitful field for research. In 1958, at the age of 33, Lederberg received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in bacterial genetics.

A former professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin and at Stanford University School of Medicine, Lederberg is currently Sackler Foundation scholar and president emeritus at the Rockefeller University, one of the world's leading scientific institutions devoted to biomedical research.

Lederberg has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1957 and is a charter member of its Institute of Medicine.

Recently, he has served as a consultant in national security affairs, with a focus on problems associated with biological weapons proliferation.

He is also concerned with arms control and other preventive and defensive measures, and served as an adviser to the U.S. delegation to the U.N. Committee on Disarmament in Geneva during the negotiation of the Biological Weapons Convention.

In 1989, he received the National Medal of Science, the citation for which made reference to his work as a government consultant.

Lederberg's lecture, which is organized by the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, will take place at 7:30 p.m. in the General Re Auditorium on the Stamford campus, One University Place.