Word: lederberg
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Stowaways Inside. Chief source of U.S. concern about stowaway "exobiota" (extraterrestrial life) is famed Nobel Prize-winning Geneticist Joshua Lederberg, 32, of Stanford. Lederberg is immensely nappy that the "blacksmiths" who fashion space hardware are still too clumsy to send manned expeditions to Mars or Venus. Crews that return from a foreign planet, says he, will be potential dangers to all life on earth. Though their ship may be sterilized inside and outside before re-entering the earth's atmosphere, it will be impossible to sterilize the men themselves. Like even the healthiest humans, the space travelers will...
...Lederberg is familiar with all the reasons why nonearthly life will probably perish when exposed to an earthly environment. But he points out that earth's scientists know only one kind of life, the familiar earthly form based on amino acids linked into protein molecules. This sort of life requires a watery environment and a narrow range of temperature. Elsewhere in the universe there may be living organisms that contain no amino acids, need no water, and can live and multiply at extremely high or extremely low temperatures. Such exobiota might do better on earth than native living creatures...
...implications of such a system are basic to biology. "Lacking an adequate framework of biological theory," Lederberg said recently, "we cannot easily construct a precise definition of life that could apply to all possible worlds. It would be incautious to reject the possibility of exotic forms of life that dispense with water or oxygen and that thrive at temperatures below minus 100 degrees or above 250 degrees centigrade." Lederberg hopes his experiment may one day decide the argument about whether life arose spontaneously on different planets or whether it arose everywhere (assuming it exists elsewhere) out of spores floating through...
...almost any standard, Stanford Geneticist Joshua Lederberg is the purest of pure scientists. Yet Lederberg's current interests extend into space in a way that pauperizes science fiction. Working under a Rockefeller Foundation grant, he and his Stanford team are designing and building a prototype apparatus that can be landed on, say, Mars or Venus, and can send back information about possible plants, bacteria, viruses or other micro-organisms. Landed gently on the planet's surface, the machine would automatically run out a long tongue with an adhesive surface. This would pick up plants or micro-organisms in the soil...
...Joshua Lederberg, 35, is a balding biologist?and a genius. At 21, the studious son of a New Jersey rabbi, he was already making significant contributions to genetics. Working with his teacher, Edward Tatum, at Yale, he demonstrated that bacteria have a sex life of sorts. At 27, in collaboration with one of his own students at the University of Wisconsin, Lederberg discovered that bacteria infected with certain viruses may suffer hereditary changes. His work on this process, known as transduction, won him a Nobel Prize. Now, at Stanford's School of Medicine, Lederberg's latest cause for excitement...