Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg Archive
A. I. Oparin Visits NASA Ames Research Center
May 5, 1969

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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