INAS NETHERLANDS INSTITU’

FOR ADVANCED STUDY IN

   

ROYAL NETHERLANDS ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

Wassenaar, 3 May 1993
Professor Joshua Lederberg
The Rockefeller University
1230 York Avenue
New York, N. Y¥. 10021-6399

Dear Josh:

Your welcome letter with enclosures only recently reached
me here in the Netherlands-- the forwarding of larger packages
seems to be a problem for my home institution-- and I am
answering at an early opportunity.

I have been spending the year here at the Netherlands
Institute for Advanced Study as the recipient of the Golestan
Foundation Award for Research in Psychiatry. It has been a
highly rewarding experience as I have been able to confer and
collaborate with colleagues from diverse parts of the globe
and with many of the excellent scientists located not far from
here in Germany, France, and Switzerland.

Thank you for remembering me through the Janus
connection. I am glad to know about the book. However, I did
want to make sure to say the author of the book, "The Janus
Face of Genius", used Janus in a different way than I do. She
was looking at an apparent duality in Newton’s personality not
the conceptualizing of simultaneous opposites. I do not know
about the former (and will look for the book) but I do have a
lot of evidence for the latter. The opposite faced Janus is
often used to represent duality alone, not the specific matter
of opposition that I have often observed.

I very much appreciated the reprints regarding your
current work. I have been keeping up especially with molecular
genetics this year and am therefore in a position to know how
very important is your research on differential mutability of
DNA. The overall approach and the information in the material
you sent looks very exciting. Especially edifying and
characteristic of the creative approaches you use --which I
have long appreciated --were the "rummaging through the attic"
and "anti-expert". I have written something about creative use
of error as a special process and these pieces seem to
corroborate that point. If possible, I would like to talk more
with you about this at a later date.

The idea of a probable circular process in mutations
seems quite crucial. In an interesting and not so extended way
there is a parallel issue in "psychological" creativity as
well. Many would contend that creativity is a selection

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process applied to spontaneously arising "new" ideas. While
there is something meaningful in this formulation, circularity
and other influences on the development of ideas play--I feel
quite sure--a critical role. There may be much in common
between human creativity and creativity in nature.

Thank you very much for writing. I am unfortunately
leaving here at the end of June but will fortunately then look
forward to greater proximity again and hopefully further
correspondence with you.

Sincerely,

~~,

Albert Rothenberg M.D.
Enc.