In Memoriam: Norton Zinder (1929–2012) Geneticist

Z inder, a superb geneticist (who also embraced biochemistry), died on February 3, 2012, following a long illness. He was 83. Zinder came of age at the dawn of microbial genetics. A prodigy with an eidetic memory, he was only 15 when he graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, where he built his first incubator for growing bacteria (a 60-W light bulb in a box with a thermostat). After earning his undergraduate degree at Columbia University only 3 years later, he migrated to the University of Wisconsin in Madison; his sweetheart and bride, Marilyn, soon joined him. As a graduate student with Joshua Lederberg (another Bronx-born wun-derkind a few years his senior), he commenced to extend Lederberg's studies of bacterial conjugation. While trying to understand why his Salmonella were not behaving properly , Norton discovered transduction, the process by which viruses carry DNA from one organism to another. Norton always was sure that animal viruses do the same with their eukaryotic host. That is now well established. The Perspectives article that Norton wrote for GENETICS (Genetics 1992 132: 291–294) marking the 40th anniversary of the discovery of transduction provides a captivating description of how the combination of chance, insight, and careful experimentation led to that discovery and his deduction that the process is mediated by phage. Norton also participated in the discovery of penicillin selection and co-authored a landmark paper with Lederberg, " Concentration of biochemical mutants of bacteria with penicillin " (J Am Chem Soc. 1948 70: 4267). Years later he delighted in showing visitors a filter paper that he had retrieved from an old lab notebook that he used to replica-plate some of those mutants. After joining the faculty of The Rockefeller University in 1952, Zinder and Tim Loeb, his first student, isolated bacteriophages that could grow only on strains carrying the F (fertility) factor responsible for bacterial sex. Thus was the first phage with an RNA genome (f2) identified. Access to large quantities of a homogeneous RNA opened the door to many fundamental questions, which Norton and his students attacked with vigor. Always there were mutants— and, once they knew that the genome was the message, biochemistry—that revealed the nature of nonsense suppressors and how protein synthesis initiates and terminates. In the late 1960s, a NOVA television program, " Stop or Go, " explained some of these discoveries. Norton and his lab members reenacted their …