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Esther M. Zimmer's interest in Aleksandr Ivanovich Oparin began when she was
a young graduate student at Stanford University in 1946, well before Esther
and Joshua Lederberg were married, and a decade before they moved to the San
Francisco Bay Area. Indeed, even though his NLM website claims that "[b]y
publicly promoting exobiology, [Joshua] Lederberg almost single-handedly
gained a place for biologists in the burgeoning U.S. space program,"
1, 2 , his interest did not extend to
attending Oparin's talk when he visited the San Francisco Bay Area in May,
1969. Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg and Arthur Kornberg were two of the few
research scientists who were interested in conferring with Oparin when he
visited NASA Ames Research Center, where Esther took the last three photographs
below.
Harlyn Halvorson and Holger Jannasch were both interested in the origin of
life and evolution. Their interests melded with Esther's interest
in life and biochemistry both on and outside the earth, as studied
by such people as Aleksandr I. Oparin.3
1 See excerpt from
"Launching a New Science: Exobiology and the Exploration of Space",
on the National Science Library website for Joshua Lederberg.
2 Joshua Lederberg helped design a biomedical
toolkit that was intended to detect signs of "life" in the soil of Mars. Eric T. Kool
and Steven Benner later produced laboratory evidence that the equipment used in
the space program to detect life is faulty. Indeed, one must be concerned not
only with life, but with precursors to life (such as DNA and RNA) and other
molecules. See Excerpts from
"Scientists Are Adding Letters to Life's Alphabet", originally published in
the New York Times on July 24, 2001.
3 See personal correspondence from Harlyn
O. Halvorson to Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg, in this website.
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