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Esther Lederberg, 83, a Founder of Bacterial Genetics (New York Sun)

Lederberg earned her doctorate in 1950 at the University of Wisconsin, where her husband, just 22, had been appointed professor of genetics. It was at Madison at the Lederbergs made seminal discoveries, including a lab technique called replica plating that uses scraps of velvet to literally imprint identical bacterial colonies in Petri dishes.