Nobel Laureate and former Stanford geneticist Joshua Lederberg died Feb. 2 of pneumonia. He was 82.

Lederberg won the 1958 Nobel Prize for Physiology of Medicine for discovering that bacteria can swap DNA in a process called recombination. His discoveries helped researchers understand how bacteria can develop new traits, including resistance to antibiotics.

Lederberg arrived at Stanford’s School of Medicine to become the chair of genetics in 1959. He left the University in 1978 to become president of Rockefeller University in New York, N.Y.

Lederberg advised a total of nine White House administrations. In 2006, President Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Lederberg also coined the term exobiology, or the study of the possibility of alien life, and worked to establish it as a legitimate scientific discipline.