UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ

 

 

BERKELEY * DAVIS * IRVINE * LOS ANGELES * RIVERSIDE * SAN DIEGO * SAN FRANCISCO SANTA BARBARA * SANTA CRUZ

 

 

 

DIVISION OF NATURAL SCIENCES SANTA CRUZ, CALIFORNIA 95064
THIMANN LABORATORIES
March 28, 1977

Professor Joshua Lederberg
Dept. of Genetics

The School of Medicine
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

Dear Josh:

I am afraid I cannot add much to your material on Tatum nor answer most of
your questions. I think some light is shed on Tatum's decision to go into the
fly eye pigments by the fact that Beadle and I at Harvard, in the year before
Beadle went to Stanford, developed a quantitative method for assaying the v
hormone in small quantities. It had been deduced to be a diffusible substance,
but we were able to get it in extracts and to quantify the effect on the eye
color. In fact we published a paper on this (PNAS 23 143-146, 1937). Beadle
got very stimulated by this rather simple development and saw that an exciting
project could be worked up, using active extracts. I think it was in this
way that he communicated his excitment to Tatum and persuaded the latter to go
in with him. It was indeed too bad that after they had got Haagen Smit to
collaborate on the isolation of the vt substance that they should have been
preceded in publication. The work was very well done and the result must have
been very disappointing.

In regard to the Drosophila work, you might have mentioned that Tatum did
an important job of working out the nutrient requirements. At that time very
little was known about this and the flies had been grown on a yeast medium
since the early days. He identified several B vitamins as necessary for the
growth of the larvae (PNAS 25, 490-497, 1939).

Another point you raise is the question about the work on Penicillium. There
was a report on this work; you will find it in J. Bact. 49, 101-104, 1945. In
this work, however, Tatum's collaboration is not mentioned (at least in the
authorship); they extended the previous methods to larger scale procedures, but
did not make important changes. From the fact that Tatum's name is not on the
authorship I suspect that he was only peripherally involved in this rather routine
job. Why Tatum went to Yale I never did understand (marital affairs, perhaps?).
I felt that he had a good future at Stanford. However, as it happened, Beadle
left shortly thereafter and no harm was done.
-2-

Incidentally, it was my memory that at Cal Tech Beadle was very scornful of
Lindegren's work on Neurospora; it was only later that he began to take it more
seriously.

I wish you luck with the write-up, and am sorry I can not help more.
Yours sincerely,

Cea rf { th

Kenneth V. Thimann
Professor of Biology