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2 Lederberg believed a "germ-free world" was hypothetically possible and a useful concept to think with. it is just nonsense to talk of eradication." 1 Huxley was responding to a discussion between Hilary Koprowski, the renowned virologist and immunologist, and the Nobel Prize-winning molecular and exo-biologist Joshua Lederberg. In 1963 at a symposium on the future of man, the biologist Julian Huxley forcefully declared a "germ-free world is an ecological absurdity, just as a perpetual motion machine is a mechanical absurdity.
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