It has always been a bit of a mystery .
Joshua Lederberg, after all, was in a military hospital on Long Island in the fall of 1943 when Henry Dawson came downtown to talk up his development of bacterial transformation (aka HGT) at the Columbia University Department of Zoology and so Joshua had to have missed the actual lecture.
He went to his grave wondering how he came to hear of it - all his fellow students and his teachers denied telling him of it.
But he did recall hearing Gladys Hobby lecture on penicillin a year later when he returned to uptown Columbia's Med School.
He forgot later in life than Hobby was the closest co-worker of Dawson (he was never great at accurately recording citations) and that she had actually first joined Dawson because of a shared interest in HGT.
Perhaps she mentioned this at the lecture as part of an informal Q & A - and this sparked Lederberg's lifelong interest in HGT and later Nobel Prize for his work on it...
Joshua Lederberg, after all, was in a military hospital on Long Island in the fall of 1943 when Henry Dawson came downtown to talk up his development of bacterial transformation (aka HGT) at the Columbia University Department of Zoology and so Joshua had to have missed the actual lecture.
He went to his grave wondering how he came to hear of it - all his fellow students and his teachers denied telling him of it.
But he did recall hearing Gladys Hobby lecture on penicillin a year later when he returned to uptown Columbia's Med School.
He forgot later in life than Hobby was the closest co-worker of Dawson (he was never great at accurately recording citations) and that she had actually first joined Dawson because of a shared interest in HGT.
Perhaps she mentioned this at the lecture as part of an informal Q & A - and this sparked Lederberg's lifelong interest in HGT and later Nobel Prize for his work on it...
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