Lederberg Memorial Science

Lederberg is a science side event, mostly edited by Eric Mukherjee.

Lederberg I

The Joshua Lederberg Memorial Science Tournament: Of Plasmids and People was a science side event written by Eric Mukherjee, Stevejon Guth, Andrew Hart, Alejandro Lopez-Lago, Bruce Arthur, Zhao Zhang, and Mike Cheyne. It's approximately of ACF Nationals difficulty and it features the following distribution:

• 5/5 Biology
• 5/5 Chemistry
• 5/5 Physics
• 1/1 Earth Science
• 1/1 Astronomy
• 1/2 or 2/1 Math
• 1/2 or 2/1 Computer Science
• 1/1 Other minor science/Philosophy of Science
• 1/1 Trash

It was played at the 2009 Minnesota Open, with a team led by Seth Teitler winning outright. Stats can be found here: http://sites.google.com/site/limozeen/lederberg_standings.html (this requires some fixing)

The tournament was moderately well-received, with some complaints about the excess of biology and chemistry with respect to physics and other science and the prevalence of named things in physics. However, it was praised for cutting back on the relative amount of organic chemistry and branching out into other subdisciplines.

Lederberg II

Lederberg II: Daughter Cell was written in 2014 and was head-edited by Eric Mukherjee, with help from Michael Hausinger, Saajid Moyen, Mike Cheyne and Harrison Brown. After complaints of the previous distribution, it was tweaked slightly (and made tossup-only):

• 4 Biology
• 4 Chemistry
• 4 Physics
• 2 Earth Science
• 2 Astro
• 2 Computer Science
• 1 Math (Including Applied Math)
• 1 Trash/fun(n)

It was played as a side event at the 2014 ICT, won by Team Teamocil (Seth Teitler, Selene Koo, Jake Sundberg, and Billy Beyer), over second place team Terror Bird 2: The Terrorizing (Billy Busse, Adam Silverman, Ike Jose, Brian McPeak). Seth Teitler was the highest scorer with 88ppg. The tournament was well received, with some minor complaints about physics cluing.

A later online Skype mirror was won by the CMU Department of Quizbowl Studies (Jerry Vinokurov, Victor Prieto, and Ian Drayer), and was notable for the "performance" of Steven Hines (see his article for more information).

Lederberg Trinity

Lederberg Trinity was written in 2018 and was head-edited by Eric Mukherjee. It featured a significantly larger set of writers than previous iterations, with contributions from Aakash Patel, Geoffrey Chen, Steven Silverman, Paul Lee, Jonathen Settle, Jaimie Carlson, Anson Berns, Fred Zhang, Sohum Shenoy, James Lasker, and Justin French; James Lasker also served as astro editor. The distribution was expanded to be 24 tossups:

• 5 Biology
• 5 Chemistry
• 5 Physics
• 2 Astro
• 2 Math
• 2 CS
• 2 Data Science/Stats/Applied Math
• 1 Earth Science

It was played as a side event at the 2019 ICT, where it was won by "The Nefarious Forces in Hyde Park", consisting of Kai Smith, Samir Khan, Seth Teitler, and Andrew Wang - Seth has thus won every iteration of Lederberg he has competed in.