We find the following statement on page 6 of "The Bacteriophage Lambda" edited by A. D. Hershey, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 1971:
"Lambda went unnoticed until Esther Lederberg (1951) found a derivative of K12 that had lost its prophage as an incidental result of mutagenic treatment with ultraviolet light, and had thus become sensitive to infection with lambda."
That Esther Lederberg made the initial discovery of λ-phage is well-known. For example, François Jacob noted this too:
"To find out, for example, whether the prophage was
located in the cytoplasm of the bacterium or was, on the
contrary, connected with its genetic material. Not long
before, Josh Lederberg's wife, Esther, had found that the
colon bacillus, whose conjugation had been observed, was
lysogenic; that it harbored a prophage called 'lambda.'"
("The Statue Within: An Autobiography", by François
Jacob, Basic Books, Inc., New York, 1988, p. 260)
Additional supporting documentation:
"Chance intervened still
further in the development of bacterial genetics by placing a
laboratory refrigerator containing a vial of K12 within convenient
reach of the workbench of Lederberg's first wife, Esther, at
a strategic moment in her career as a scientist. On progeny of the
original Stanford isolate that she happened to pick off the
refrigerator shelf she found bacteriophage that no
one had seen before. She called it lambda
phage (lambda is the Greek letter L), having no suspicion of the
role it would later play in the construction of hybrid DNA molecules
not known to exist in nature."
also
"Kaiser had spent most of his professional life in the 'phage school'
of genetics. He had done landmark work on lambda phage that
Dr. Esther Lederberg had found attached to
the K12 strain of E. coli."
("Recombinant DNA: The Untold Story", by Lear, John, Crown
Publishers, New York, 1978, pp. 18, 39)
The last bit of supporting information is that Esther realized
through Larry Morse's work that Lambda could be induced as a
heterogenote (partially integrated into the bacterial chromosome).
Both Esther M. Zimmer and Larry Morse both knew about the ability of
bacteriophage lambda to be induced before the resaearch on this
subject by Weigle.
Click here to see evidence
Attempts have been made to extend the original 1951 discovery (by Esther Lederberg) of lambda phage to make it appear as research done by J. Lederberg two years later (at a time when J. Lederberg worked under the direction of Esther Lederberg). Of course, these claims have no basis in fact. Indeed, what are the facts? Click here to find the facts. Why might these false claims be made? 1 The following answers this question.
Research on bacteriophage lambda has had far-reaching effects on the development of molecular genetics. The lambda system provided one of the first detailed connections between genetics and DNA structure (Hershey, 1971). It provided the best model for studying the molecular basis of genetic recombination. Studies on the immunity system in lambda were a key element in the development of the repressor or negative control model of gene regulation by Jacob and Monod (see Section 10.10). Research on restriction and modification 3 using lambda (see Section 6.15) led to the discovery of restriction enzymes and, eventually, to their use in genetic engineering (see Chapter 11). Lambda has become one of the principal vectors in recombinant DNA research. Phage lambda was the first rather complex virus whose behavior could be really understood at the molecular level. Numerous proteins of lambda have been isolated and purified, and their sequences have been determined. The complete DNA base sequence, 48,513 base pairs, has been determined. Many ideas from lambda research have found their way into studies on the molecular genetics of eucaryotes.
Lambda was also of great value in elucidating bacterial transduction 4 as well as the development of the operon 5.
Supporting documentation may be found in the following letter from Allan Campbell
Supporting documentation may be found in the following letter from Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca
1
"...we had anticipated that the provirus for λ would behave
as a genetic unit but Dr. Esther Lederberg's first crosses were
quite startling in their implication that the prophage segregated
as a typical chromosomal marker (34).",
"Les Prix Nobel en 1958", Stockholm, Imprimerie Royal P. A. Norstedt
& Söner, 1959, p. 181.
Note that this quote explicitly refers to Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg's
first crosses, thus is discussed in the first Lambda paper
ever published. However, reference 34 falsely cites a later paper by
Lederberg, E. M., and J. Lederberg written two years later in 1953!
The first paper was by Esther Lederberg (sole author), and was published
in 1951.
Note that here, this deception extends beyond the numerous
deceptions found on the NLM website for Dr. J. Lederberg, as this
deception appears during the speech given at the award of the Nobel
Prize itself.
2
"The Emergence of Bacterial Genetics", by Thomas D. Brock,
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1990, p. 185
3
ibid., p. 326
4
ibid., p. 203
5
ibid., pp. 299 - 303