The first documented evidence of Esther M. Zimmer's interest in Aleksandr
Ivanovich Oparin is when she was a young graduate student at Stanford
University in 1946.
(See
http://www.esthermlederberg.com/EImages/Archive/Evolution.html
).
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, 3 , Joshua Lederberg's claimed
interest in the ideas of A. I. Oparin (for which there is no documented
evidence) did not extend to attending Oparin's talk when
A. I. Oparin visited the San Francisco Bay Area in May, 1969. Esther M.
Zimmer Lederberg and Arthur Kornberg were two of the few research
scientists who conferred with Oparin when he visited NASA Ames Research
Center, where Esther took the last three photographs below.
Harlyn Halvorson, Holger Jannasch, and J. B. S. Haldane were also 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.4
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. The depth of the correspondence between
Aleksandr I. Oparin and J. Lederberg at its height is rigorously discussed in his
Oparin correspondence .
3 For additional information,
click here and also click here to see a proposal
for an exobiology experiment by
Esther M. Lederberg .
4 See personal correspondence from Harlyn
O. Halvorson to Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg, in this website.
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