Joshua Lederberg

How can proteins cause synthesis of more of their own? That would require a reverse flow of information from proteins to DNA.

Thus, several scientists, including Linus Pauling and James Watson, rejected Jern's theory outright, though his more Darwinian-minded colleagues like Gunther Stent and Joshua Lederberg welcomed it more enthusiastically.

Jern's theory did not perish, but was instead modified into a cellular selection theory.

In a 1957 review, David Talmadge credited Churn with originating the modern idea of selection in immunology and added a tentative but crucial detail.

To his credit, Burnett continued to acknowledge Jern's role in its origins.

Interestingly, for Burnett, the main virtue of the theory was in explaining the self versus non-self distinction, which became a major focus of his later investigations.

Yet, as Burnett initially had his doubts about the clonal selection theory, it is telling that he published it in the obscure Australian Journal of Science, explaining the choice in his autobiography, If, perish the thought, there was something very wrong about the clonal selection concept, the publication is an out-of-the-way Australian journal and would mean that very few people in America or England would see it." Happily, the first confirming experimental evidence for the clonal selection theory arrived in 1958, when Gustav Nossel and Joshua Lederberg showed that each lymphoid cell produces only one kind of antibody by binding specificity.

In 1976, Susumu Tonegawa, his discovery of VDJ recombination, further clarified the molecular foundations of the generation of antibody diversity.

a virus that infects bacteria, which became one of the most important model systems in all of molecular biology.

And her husband, Joshua Lederberg, won the Nobel Prize.

In 1958, for work that she was deeply involved in, her contributions were often attributed to him.

She was a brilliant scientist in her own right, and the Nobel Committee looked at the marriage and saw one scientist.