STANFORD UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER

DEPARTMENT OF GENETICS

June 8, 1977

Professor Norton D. Zinder
1230 York Avenue
New York, New York 10021

Dear Norton:

I was very glad to have the candid snapshot of your trip to China.
I was sorry what you had to report about C. C. Tan. The many different
levels at which he must have suffered during these past years are more
than I can comprehend.

But rather than try to pursue this now, I hope it will be possible
to follow through on your making a visit here as you had suggested.
I have talked to Doug Murray, who directs our U.S.-China Studies Progran,
and -have asked him to get in touch with you about setting possible
dates for an informal discussion with you. I am sure this would be of
great interest to a number of people in that group here at Stanford.
That would give us an excellent opportunity to go over a lot of things
that now are on our common agenda.

Well, I can see that we are both still pretty upset about what's
going on in the DNA regulation arena. I don't think that blowing the
lid off would be particularly helpful in the long run; and the very
painstaking and patient effort at educating the relevant people in Congress
does seem like the only hope. "I told you so" is the furthest thing from
my mind, Norton. What has been happening just hurts too much to even
think of dealing with it at that level.

The latest wrinkle is that the transfer of plasmids from staphylo-
coccus to bacillus has been criticized as "an evasion" of the guidelines,
and I gather there is a committee at NIH studying whether or not to in-
corporate transformation, and I suppose cross-breeding, within the frame-
work of the regulation.

The modest proposal that I intend to surface pretty soon is that
Congress should solve all of our problems in this apea by a series of
legislative enactments. They repeal the law E = MC’, and thereby solve
the problem of nuclear proliferation; and legislate against the natural

DEPARTMENT OF GENETICS, STANFORD UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE, STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 94305 © (415) 497-5052
Professor Norton D. Zinder ~2- June 8, 1977

occurrence of microbial evolution and pathogenicity and solve most of
our biological problems to boot.

Not that all of our problems come from Congress: our own colleagues
have their own particular diseases. Now that, six months later, I
finally did get a somewhat more encouraging vote I can share with you
my own most recent encounter with peer review (enclosed).

Well, on top of every other good reason to look forward to getting

together, misery loves company so I hope that the opportunity will
materialize.

I will be at a meeting at Rutgers the first week in July and am

trying hard to fix up my schedule to be able to come to New York at
least for a day or so. I will let you know.

All the best,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics

Enclosure

JL: ek~f£