Word: bacterias
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Regarded as one of the world's leading young geneticists, Lederberg is noted for his outstanding discoveries in bacterial genetics, including the finding of sexual multiplication in bacteria...
...showed that at least one form of bacteria is capable of sexual reproduction and in 1948 demonstrated that the heredity of bacteria could be altered...
...Bacteria and Flies. The award in medicine went to three U.S. scientists working in genetics-a field that had not even been named when Dynamite Maker Alfred Nobel died...
...Transduction. The other half of the medicine prize was awarded to Professor Joshua Lederberg (33) of the University of Wisconsin, whom his colleagues unstintingly rate as a genius. When 22 and working under Tatum as a graduate student at Yale, Lederberg proved that bacteria have a sex life of a sort, i.e., reproduce by the union of two organisms, with a consequent exchange of genes. This discovery widely expanded the field of experiment, since bacteria are even handier than molds in genetic experiments...
Even more important was Lederberg's later discovery that viruses preying on bacteria can change the heredity of their victims. In this process, which is called transduction, a virus invades a bacterium, breaks it up and reorganizes its material into hundreds of new virus particles. If these particles in turn infect another bacterium and it survives, they sometimes change it into a new strain. Apparently the viruses, acting somewhat like submicroscopic spermatozoa, take hereditary material from the first bacterium and transfer it to the second...