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Date: June 13, 1977

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* Joshua Lederberg

Dr. Russell Perry Hager's reminiscences about Ed Tatum

I had noticed that Dr. Hager was listed as a technical assistant
in the 1942 PNAS paper and got the idea of trying to Look him up for
recollections, since I have found so few people who were in the lab
during 1941-42.

Dr. Hager later on became a physician and internist. He was quite
easy to locate from American Men of Science and the telephone information
service. When I called him he told me that he had had a stroke not long
ago, but was recovering and his voice was certainly very firm.

He was just delighted to talk about Ed Tatum, whom he regarded as
a very fine person. He was more ambivalent about George Beadle, whom
he said, "He was a hard man to get along with. He liked me at first,
but later on wanted only people who would be able to do scut work and get
the work on neurospora, rather than Ph.D.'s." He had come to Stanford
as a research assistant, after completing his Ph.D. on Habrobracon during
the summer of 1941 at Woods Hole. He was a little confused about the
dates, but recalling that he had been at Stanford at the time of Pearl
Harbor, it became quite clear that he first arrived at Stanford in
September 1941. He believed that he had been on the very first isolation
of an auxotroph, referring to a thiamin mutant. I had to tell him, but
did not persevere, that that was not the first isolation.

His account was that Tatum and Beadle had numerous bull sessions
concerning their continuing work on the biochemical genetics of Drosophila.
Tatum teased Beadle for continuing to work with an organism like Drosophila,
whose chemistry was so difficult. Why not work where you know more of
the chemistry and simplify the whole deal? Beadle responded that they
also needed to know the genetics. Well, they could not work on bacteria
because the genetics was not accessible. So Beadle then suggested
neurospora as a simple organism whose genetics already had been worked out.
Tatum then responded that he was quite sure that neurospora could be
grown on a simple synthetic medium. Beadle put in the idea of irradiating
the single spores, hopefully in meiosis(sic!), and from there it went to
the idea of getting auxotrophic mutants. He was really not able to give
me more detail about the transitions of these ideas. Later, when a
second thiamin mutant was isolated, according to Hager, it proved to
complement the growth of the first one, and this led to the notion of
blocks in the two halves of thiamin.

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File: R. P. Hager on Ed Tatum -2- June 13, 1977

Apparently, the work was organized in such a way that the mutants
were isolated and identified in Tatum's laboratory; when an auxotroph was
indicated, Ed would run down the requirements in more detail. Then
Beadle would do the genetics to look at the segregation.

Hager recalled that he had commented to them at the time that
this work would earn a Nobel prize and was as important as Mendell's.
Their response was "this was such a simple experiment."

Hager himself felt a bit out of place because he had been hired to
do Drosophila research, and they had changed direction in the interval.
However, they retrained him to be a technician doing the scut work on
neurospora. In some respects Hager resented this, but he was willing and
eager to put up with it because he felt it was terribly important, and,
as he says now, was one of the most significant experiences of his own
life.

I urged him to record a memorandum redescribing all this. He
demurred somewhat, but if I would just write him a letter he thinks
the he might be able to just dictate something that I can transcribe.

JL:iek-£

Telephone #: 401-781-2040 or 401-521-2331