Dr. Joshua Lederberg - scientist, Nobel laureate, visionary thinker, and friend of the Forum on Microbial Threats - died on February 2, 2008. His death marked the departure of a central figure of modern science. It was in his honor that the Institute of Medicine's Forum on Microbial Threats convened a public workshop on May 20-21, 2008, to examine Dr. Lederberg's scientific and policy contributions to the marketplace of ideas in the life sciences, medicine, and public policy. The resulting workshop summary, Microbial Evolution and Co-Adaptation, demonstrates the extent to which conceptual and technological developments have, within a few short years, advanced our collective understanding of the microbiome, microbial genetics, microbial communities, and microbe-host-environment interactions.
The central themes of this workshop were derived from a comprehensive essay Lederberg published in Science (2000) titled "Infectious History"; In this piece, Lederberg suggested a paradigm shift in the way we identify and think about the microbial world around us, replacing notions of aggression and conflict with a more ecologically -and evolutionarily- informed view of the dynamic relationships among and between microbes, hosts, and their environments.
This volume is dedicated to Joshua Lederberg's life and living legacies.