Feb. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Joshua Lederberg, the Nobel Prize- winning researcher who became one of the first scientists to manipulate genes, has died. He was 82 and had helped lay the groundwork for the biotechnology industry.

Lederberg died of pneumonia at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York on Feb. 2, according to a statement posted yesterday on the Web site of Rockefeller University of New York. He was a science adviser to nine U.S. presidents, said a fellow scientist, James Darnell.

Lederberg's work as a graduate student at Yale University, on the genetic structure of bacteria, led to his half of a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded in 1958. Working with the E. coli bacterium, he demonstrated the ability of genes to recombine into altered forms, said Darnell, a genetics researcher at Rockefeller.

``He was in his 20s, going to Yale and getting his Ph.D. and discovered that not only did bacteria have genes, which was not appreciated at the time, but that the genes can be transferred from one bacterial cell to another,'' Darnell said in a telephone interview today. ``This allowed the total mapping of all the genes in the bacterial cell.''

Lederberg's discovery helped start up the biotechnology industry because it allowed researchers to ``isolate particular chunks of DNA, put these chunks into E. coli, and grow individual pieces of DNA using E. coli as an incubator,'' Darnell said. ``All this technology roots back to the ability to transfer genes into E. coli, which was Lederberg's crowning achievement.''

Wide Interests

Lederberg had wide scientific and intellectual interests, Darnell said. When he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006, President George W. Bush noted Lederberg's attraction to space travel and his concerns about the dangers of biological warfare.

Lederberg wrote a science column that circulated in newspapers, including the Washington Post. In the column, he discussed the social implications of emerging technologies. He wrote about the ways biology and technology were changing modern life, covering topics from in vitro fertilization to chemical and industrial poisons and infectious disease, Darnell said.

``He's been talking publicly about emerging infectious diseases for a long time, even before AIDS,'' Darnell said.

Lederberg was the first of three sons born to Rabbi Zwi H. Lederberg and his wife, Esther, according to the Nobel Foundation. He was born in Montclair, New Jersey, on May 23, 1925, and attended Public School 46, Junior High School 164 and Stuyvesant High School, all public schools in New York City. He got through the high school at age 15, and went to Columbia University for an undergraduate degree and medical school.

President of Rockefeller

After serving as a research fellow at Yale, in New Haven, Connecticut, Lederberg was on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin and Stanford University School of Medicine before joining Rockefeller, a biomedical-research university, now with 200 graduate students. He was Rockefeller's president from 1978 to 1990, after which he continued to perform research at the university on molecular genetics and informatics.

Lederberg is survived by his second wife, Marguerite S. Lederberg of New York City; his daughter, Anne Lederberg, also of the city; his stepson, David Kirsch of Chevy Chase, Maryland, and two grandchildren, according to Rockefeller University.

To contact the reporter on this story: Rob Waters in San Francisco at rwaters5@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: February 5, 2008 17:32 EST