October 30, 1972
Dear Michael,
I am nearly recovered from the "shock" of my return; the accumulated workload, a touch of flu, the time change as well as the general fatigue and letdown that are only now beginning to dissipate.
I think our conversations ad review of the state of the experiment were very useful. Your fresh look helped clarify some of the prejudices. I'd accumulated and helped sharpen my views of what needs to be done.  Marianne and I went to talk to Helene Smith last week.  Although she was somewhat less enthusiastic about tackling another round of isolation and characterization of 3T3 abortives, she did finally agree to isolate 5 fresh SV-3T3 abortives and 1 stable for us to analyze for SV40 DNA.  Getting prepared for the analysis will be tedious since growing a couple of grams of these 3T3 is slow and costly. Helene feels obligated to clear up the "confusion" of her's and Martin's experiments. I think she's a bit more "worried" about the variable quality of Martin's 32P-SV40 DNA probe than she's willing to admit openly.  In any case as soon as we get something from her we'll get onto it so that we'll know whether we have a job.  We did note that our cell DNA isolation for hybridization is always from isolated nuclei whereas they always did their's from whole cells.  When we repeat the assays of SV 3T3 abortives, we'll do it both ways to be sure.
Marianne is preparing to repeat the Cot's we discussed (SC-2, SA-5, MA9 and MA9E etc.). Are you in the process of cloning so that we can examine those?  You recall that there was a mistake in the value for ST-2) in the Table we prepared. In trying to rush the slide for Cold Spring Harbor the wrong values were entered in the Table; they should read
[TABLE]
Visiting the ICRF is always a pleasure. You and Veronica were both very kind in looking after me that weekend. Gardening shows, walks in the fields, changing tires, picking blackberries and fish and chips in the nearby pub are not my usual weekend activities but I'm beginning to believe that perhaps they should be.  My best regards, to Sally, Paul and Veronica's "Pop". The lab is always fun and when the expansion occurs this winter, things will surely pick up. I will be in touch with you about the January meeting at Asilomar but we will look forward to you spending a bit of time at Stanford afterwards.
I did get the check for the expenses. It was for $447 which is a bit more than we discussed (especially since I was given a 20 honorarium while I was in London). If there's an error let me know and I could return the excess;  or perhaps we can use the overage for your visit to Stanford.
I'll try to keep you in touch with how things are progressing here and I hope you'll do the same. My very best to Renato and Maureen (I guess I'll see Renato next month at the Roche Award dinner), your Maureen, the lovely ladies in the office and all of the people in the lab who helped make my visit such a pleasant one.
Sincerely yours,
P.S.  Attached are Marianne's notes on the clones we talked about.