Memo from To:

JOSHUA LEDERBERG

JUL 18 1977

a more cheerful note

One of my colleagues in microbiology responded
to the attached query with his lecture notes in
Chemistry-245, Jan-Mar 1941 (sic), which it
has been a pleasure to explore.

The entries for 2/18/41 are particularly
revealing, and I would make a strong bet are
the trigger that Beadle mentions in his
Recollections. I would guess that Tatum did
lay it out to the point of picturing how
genes might be involved in the biosynthesis
of thiamin, resulting in growth-factor require-
‘ments of different kinds; and that Beadle made
the leaps to a) "Let's look for mutants this
way", and b) recalling Dodge and Lindegren's
work on Neurospora,"let'’s try that organism."
(Neurospora is recalled in the textbook by
Sturtevant and Beadle 19380r9)

“Then Tatum would have recalled that Fries
had worked on the nutrition of other ascomycetes
at Kogl's lab (36-37) and offered to try to
grow Neurospora on synthetic media, which had
not been done previously. _

I am only- uneasy: that v- Wagtendonk says
they ahd already started-irradiating Neurospora
in FEBRUARY 41, which is a superfast réaction.
When I can get to the Tatum notebooks, if they
really still exist-at Rockefeller archives, I
may. be. able to crosscheck -the dates.

(

“.

  
     

 

PROFESSOR JOSHUA LEDERBERG
~ Department of Genetics
v ~~ School of Medicine

Stanford University
Stanford, California 94305