Dr. Joshua Lederberg

Dr. Joshua Lederberg is a member of the Advisory Board at the ANSER Institute for Homeland Security.

"Dr. Joshua Lederberg, a research geneticist, is Sackler Foundation Scholar and President-emeritus at the Rockefeller University, one of the world's leading scientific institutions devoted to biomedical research. Dr. Lederberg was educated at Columbia and Yale University, where he pioneered in the field of bacterial genetics with the discovery of genetic recombination in bacteria. Because of their simple structure and rapid growth, bacteria have afforded geneticists a fruitful field for research, which has also ripened recently into many medical and industrial applications. In 1958, at the age of 33, Dr. Lederberg received the Nobel Prize in Physiology of Medicine for this work and subsequent research on bacterial genetics.

"Dr. Lederberg has been a professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin and then at Stanford University School of Medicine, until he came to the Rockefeller University in 1978. A member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1957, and a charter member of its Institute of Medicine, Dr. Lederberg has been active on many government advisory boards, such as NIH study sections and the National Advisory Mental Health Council, and has served as Chairman of the President's Cancer Panel.

"In recent years, he has been particularly active as a consultant in national security affairs, and has served on such bodies as the Defense Science Board, the CNO Executive Panel, the Intelligence Community's Proliferation Policy panels, and the Commission on Integrated Long Range Strategy, with particular concern for problems of biological weapons proliferation. Since 1972, when he served as advisor to the US delegation at the UN Committee on Disarmament in Geneva during the negotiation of the Biological Weapons Convention, he has been particularly concerned with arms control and other preventative and defensive measures.

"Dr. Lederberg has been awarded numerous honorary Doctor of Science M.D., and Doctor of Military Medicine degrees, as well as a foreign membership of the Royal Society, London. He retired as president of the Rockefeller University in July 1990, and continues his research activities there in chemical mutagenesis in bacteria."