[2] Kaiser received in 1950 his bachelor's degree from Purdue University and in 1955 his PhD from Caltech in biology.
Kaiser was in 1956 a postdoc at the Pasteur Institute in Paris (where he worked in Francois Jacob's group) and afterward became an instructor and then in 1958 an assistant professor in microbiology at Washington University in St. Louis.
In the beginning of his career, Kaiser concentrated on the molecular genetics of bacteriophage lambda.
In the 2000s his laboratory team did research on genetic and biochemical methods to control the swarm and propagation behavior of the bacterial species Myxococcus xanthus.
When starved, the Myxococcus bacteria aggregate together to make fruiting bodies, each with approximately