Chapter 12: Berkeley Debacle

Lederberg was becoming restless after ten years at Madison. If some members of the genetics department at the University of Wisconsin had had concerns about hiring him in 1947 (Chapter 6), a decade later the problem was reversed — they now had concerns that he would leave. The abrasive personality that his colleagues experienced when he was a graduate student had softened. His influence on campus was important, not only for the development of the genetics department, but for biology as a whole. As the Chair of the genetics department, Alexander Brink, recalled, “he had many of the characteristics of a genius and was just bursting with mental and physical energy”…