Esther met Joshua Lederberg shortly before she graduated from Stanford. They married months later, when she was 23 and he was 21, and soon headed off to the University of Wisconsin, where they would begin years of fruitful collaboration and she would earn a Ph.D. Joshua, by all accounts a brilliant thinker, became famous for his big ideas. Esther, meanwhile, developed expertise as an experimentalist, doing the often tedious work of testing big ideas in the lab.
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