STANFORD UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER

DEPARTMENT OF GENETICS

November 2, 1976

Dr. Harriet Zuckerman
Department of Sociology
Fayerweather
Columbia University

New York, New York 10027

Dear Harriet,

Dave Goddard, as Home Secretary of the NAS, did commission Beadle and me
to write the memoir for the NAS on Ed Tatum, so I am indeed starting to collect
the material for this. These memoirs are not such comprehensive biographies but
I thought that the opportunity should not be wasted to collect a meaningful set
of documents which are already difficult to accumulate and which will certainly
. disappear if not tended to. I will probably try to find some occasion during the
next 6 months to spend a day at the Rockefeller library and meanwhile will be
in touch with Howard Tatum and with a number of his professional associates
towards this end. If you have any ideas of points to look for that may. emerge
from our own joint work or from anything else that you happen to know about,
this would be a good time to try to sensitize me to them. I do not have any very
clear organizing theme in mind at the present time, and as I already said, the
memoir is not the kind of vehicle for analytical exposition that I hope our paper
in Daedalus will be a prototype of.

One thing that I am finding again is that even getting the local history
straight for 1940 is already very difficult! There literally seem to be just no
records on personnel or department policy or any other important themes for that
interval. One part of the problem is that Ray Lyman Wilbur retired in 1943, but
his own memoirs are avowedly incomplete with respect to the last 10 years of his
term and specifically with respect to the encouragement of scientific research |
at Stanford! What he did with his own papers, I just don't know, and I am not sure
it would be worth a great deal of effort to try to chase them down because they
so awkwardly overlap the period of interest with respect to Ed Tatum.‘

I did talk to Arthur Giese who was a contemporary of Ed's in the department
and also to June Tatum, and they did both corroborate the picture that 1943-44
was a very difficult time indeed in biology. June mentioned Wilbur's death and the
fact that his successor Tresidder was relatively ineffectual and not very interested
in science as being contributing factors to the well known fact that "the
department just fell apart around that time". To add to the calamity, C.V. Taylor
was in his terminal illness during 1944-45 but refused to relinquish the chair
at this still very critical time. I have not been able to get a clear confrontation
on the question of whether Ed was denied tenure and would have been obliged to
leave: I just don't know what the tenure system at Stanford was in 1944, It is
quite clear from what both June and Arthur said that he was not offered a promotion
from assistant professor nor was the university in a position to offer very much
by way of facilities. Yale did make him a very attractive offer and in any case
that was irresistible.

~2-

DEPARTMENT OF GENETICS, STANFORD UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE, STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 94303 © (415) 497-5052
Dr. Harriet Zuckerman ~2- 11/2/76

I did question Beadle about the same circumstances and he was unable to
tell me whether he had already decided to leave Stanford for Cal Tech at the
time that these questions arose vis-a-vis Ed Tatum. I did not feel it would be
worthwhile to press him on whether he would have made a strong effort to keep
Ed at Stanford if the resources were available. He himself made a rather strong
point that he does not have a clear recollection of the details of that time,
and as you can see from his enclosed letter, he in fact expressed his gratitude
that I was trying to approach the same matter from a more critical standpoint.

I am still looking to see whether there are any histories of the university
for the interval of its flowering. I would imagine that Wally Sterling would
try to write something along these lines, and perhaps I will give him a buzz.

Anyhow, I just wanted to raise the general background of this particular
pursuit without having anything very concrete to ask of you about it at that time.

Sincerely yours,

Shua Lederberg
rofessor of Genetics

 
 
  

 

JL/rr

Cla: 48 rewme ob.