Textbook of AI

1925–2008, Geneticist, Nobel laureate; co-developer of DENDRAL

Joshua Lederberg was an American molecular biologist who won the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine at the age of 33 for his discoveries of bacterial conjugation and genetic transduction. His relevance to AI is through his collaboration with Edward Feigenbaum and Bruce Buchanan at Stanford on DENDRAL (from 1965), the first major expert system, which inferred organic molecular structure from mass-spectrometry data using rules elicited from Lederberg's own expertise as a chemist and microbiologist. Lederberg later served as president of Rockefeller University and was an influential adviser on biological-warfare and emerging-disease policy.