THE ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY

1230 YORK AVENUE NEW YORK, NY 10021
October 31, 1978

 

JOSHUA LEDERBERG

PRESIDENT

Dr. William Estes

Chairman

James Murray Luck
Selection Committee

The Rockefeller University

Dear Bill:

I was delighted that you have accepted the Chair-
manship of this Committee and that it is possible to
proceed according to the schedule that you outlined,
although I agree that it may be a shade on the optimis-
tic side. I am sure that the latter motif of "critical
and integrative reviews....for scientists" was the pri-
mary intention of the donors; and in fact I thought
this had been made clear in the letter of offer to the
Academy and its response. In any event, I would be glad
to have this corroborated if the Committee agrees that
this is the more pressing requirement. Without suggest-
ing that the works are comparable, for example, I would
not want to exclude either the Origin of Theses or Socio-
biology from consideration solely on the issues of defini-
tion!

Indeed, of course, we will have to solicit nominations:
my own first preference would be a series of letters to ex-
perienced editors of major scientific publications. In
addition, I trust that Gene Garfield will be able to give
us a listing of "high impact" reviews: in fact this is al-
ready tacitly available by the identification of his al-
ready published series of "high impact articles" which
happen to be reviews. I am sure that he would agree that
there is nothing automatic in the application of that
criterion but it is one that certainly could be helpful
to all of us.
Dr. William Estes
October 31, 1978

-2-

My own personal preferences were to give more weight
to review articles and a consistent series of them over
a period of years ~- rather than to a Single public
volume. One reason is that successful monographs have
already harvested a certain degree of prestige and mone-
tary reward. Another reason is that it is not the iso-
lated article but the vocation of reviewing that, in my
own view, deserves reinforcement.

Although it would not be too difficult to meet even
twice, I suspect that a single meeting would be more
fruitful as the ultimate or penultimate one for selection
once we had worked our procedures and gone through some
of the preliminary selections by mail and telephone.
Perhaps a couple of conference calls could be set up that
could push the ball rolling even faster.

We should be careful not to exclude individuals who
have made important experimental contributions themselves
as well as contributed more comprehensive reviews. Never-
theless, other things being equal, our award would have
a more significant impact if it honored someone who was
not already well known for Original scientific work. Also
I gucss there is or rather ought not to be anything in the
statutes to prevent us from making a joint award in certain
circumstances. Given that option I think I would certainly
want to see Van Neil and Stanier in any list I would submit
in biology. But I have quite purposely not thought very
much about it until a more objective set of nominations
has been presented and I look forward to our agreeing upon
a@ procedure for that.

The task would be hopeless if we try to define it as
the choice of some optimum performance in review writing.
But as a matter of common sense if any of you are aware
of other media by which selections of this kind have been
made in the past they might be helpful in guidance to us
either for reexamination or for some of the pitfalls of
the task that has been assigned to us.

Yours sincerely,

Joshui Lederberg