Joshua Lederberg
Joshua Lederberg
Joshua Lederberg, ForMemRS was an American molecular biologist known for his work in microbial genetics, artificial intelligence, and the United States space program. He was 33 years old when he won the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering that bacteria can mate and exchange genes. He shared the prize with Edward Tatum and George Beadle who won for their work with genetics...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth23 May 1925
CountryUnited States of America
I was reading five or six years ahead of my grade during public school. I was pretty bored. I made a contract with some of my teachers that if I didn't ask too many questions, I could work in the back of the room.
I was making a lot of momentous personal decisions. I was still very very young: when the prize was awarded, I was 33; the work I had done when I was 21.
If you want to solve very complex problems, you will have to end up letting machines work out a lot of the details for themselves, and in ways that we don't understand what they are doing.
I'm chairing a UNESCO committee on how to improve global Internet communications for science; help third-world people get onto the Net so they can be part of the process.
We are all very individual. You have to find out what you can do best, and be self-conscious about that.
I'm not easily inhibited by the fact that I don't know something about a subject. It doesn't stop me from dabbling in it.
I have many shortcomings. I feel very lucky to have been able to have what I've had.
Being successful at a very young age gave me the confidence and the capability to try out other things.
A Swedish newspaper reporter called and said, You've been awarded the Prize. I was quite sure it was a practical joke.
By the time I was 12 or 13, I was studying biochemistry textbooks.
All of civility depends on being able to contain the rage of individuals.
My ambitions were already very clearly fixed by the time I was 6 or 7.
I'd like to put in a vote for the intrinsic fascination of science.
Try hard to find out what you're good at and what your passions are, and where the two converge, and build your life around that.