SCHOOL OF MEDICINE
STANFORD UNIVERSITY, STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 94505

JOSHUA LEDERBERG
JosePu D. GRANT PROFESSOR
OF GENETICS

May 4, 1978

Dr. George Pake

Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
Stanford Industrial Park

Palo Alto, CA 94304

Dear George:

The telephone is not going to work as a medium of communication
(if you have time you might resonate with an essay about that which
I enclose as an appendix). If I were a dreamer I would try to send
you this message via ARPA Net but I suspect that time hasn't quite
matured.

What I have been trying to talk to you about is not a matter of
real urgency although I think of some importance. I was very much
interested to read your presidential report in Physics Today and to
note your remark about the needs for physically trained scientists
to be involved in important policy making situations in government,
industry, and I presume also outside in consumer and similar interest
groups. I couldn't agree with you more but I wonder if you have
given much thought about how our young scientists are going to get
the extra-scientific education which may be necessary for them to do
a professionally competent job of such inter-disciplinary tasks. The
same things can be said even more strongly for the biomedical
sciences and I am facing some dilemmas of practical implementation
in trying to think how to follow through with such a paradigm in the
educational and career structures at The Rockefeller University.

I hope we do have some chance to chew this over more thoroughly
preferably through such intimate forms of communication as the Net

or failing that, lunch together or the like.

Yours sincerely,

JL/gel

D2 AAV