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INTERVIEWEE: Dr. Joshua Lederberg
INTERVIEWER: Dr. Stephanie A. Morris
PLACE: Rockefeller University
DATE: 1 April 1991

MORRIS: I'd be happy to have this transcribed and give you a
copy of the transcription.

LEDERBERG: I'd appreciate that. It's helpful for my own
archives.

MORRIS: Norton Zinder tells me that you save everything.

LEDERBERG: I have ninety-nine percent of all my correspondence,
starting with September 1947. I've never consciously thrown any
of it away. I have unfortunately more limited samples of those
kinds of papers, starting roughly 1945-1946. That was an even
more vital period in the history of bacterial genetics and I
somewhat lament the lacunae there but ever since I've had an
academic appointment and an office with a place to put things and
didn't move every few months I've been a squirrel. I've become
increasingly aware and self conscious that this is material of
historical value and even more assiduous and made multiple copies
of things. I've embarked on a project of trying to put those
papers in a reasonable order. I have an understanding with the

Rockefeller Archive Center that these papers will be deposited 0 p42 Cthere.

have an alternative bid from the National Library of

Medicine to put them on optical disk format; this has the virtue
of making it more accessible to me. The problem with either of
those is that there would be an interval during which they would
be out of my reach and that puts me ina little bit of a dilemma
because I'm actively working on various projects that use these
archives. But I would say right now, my main task over the next
couple of years--having moved in space which is rather more
constricted than what I had before--I've got to clean it up and
you see only a few of the boxes around here that I've really got
to get into. I have about one hundred boxes like that that have
to be cleaned up somehow. I have professional advice on
archiving and I have my own ideas on what needs to be done there
and have been actively involved in throwing less rather than more
of what's in the system. With respect to other materials, I have
in retrospect not entirely satisfactory records on all of my
publications. When I began to be aware that it would be an
issue, I started saving my drafts--the ones that would be
revelatory in some fashion of changes of view, what other people
thought and so forth. Unfortunately I don't have that until in
the mid '50s. Before then, I may or may not have any actual
manuscripts or edited materials or so on. There have been one or
two I've particularly regret not having. I would love to have
Arlington's edits of the review that I wrote in 1948. I could
probably get them out of his papers but that's gone; some of that
stuff is lost. With respect to lab notebooks that's again a

C p4@0 O

I
mixed tale. I had my own notes pretty comprehensively from 1945
through 1958. When I got to Stanford I delegated much more to
different people and so I have only a odd notebook here and
there. Some post-docs kept notes of our work but took these with
them when they left, I don't have detailed notebooks from that
time on. Probably the historically most interesting ones are in
Wisconsin and I have my own laboratory notebooks. They are next
to incomprehensive than anybody else. They are not paragons and
I wouldn't want to use them as an example for my own students at
this point. I can make some use of them, I can date critical
events but they require a little bit of memory but more just
piecing together what was in the manuscripts, and I have tried to
index a little bit, to try to help out but as I say, there is a
lot from the point of view that I never wrote down and I wouldn't
think of them as documentary resource but as an aid to memory
along with publishing a paper. They are close enough to the
events that I could probably use them. ??? There are some lapses
in that regard and you might be able to do some good things about
it. There are no books which cover discovery that would be the
most important issue. My first wife Esther Lederberg has some lab
notes but I'm not in the position to contact her. This is my
first wife; we divorced twenty-five years ago. I've been hoping
somebody would approach her with respect to ensure that they
would be properly deposited somewhere. They may or may not be in
the Stanford Archives; I've talked with the archivist there and
she was making some noises last year that she might make some 0 p4@0 UCeffort to
do that. It would be very helpful in completing the

picture and there are a few lapses for that reason. Milton
Zinder has his notebooks, I don't have them, so that's an example
that I was saying before these were distributed to different
people. Most of what I would be looking for would be to try to
date specific things, when things get started--so it's not too
hard. I do have another very important resource and these are
the stock books of both the card collection and some notebooks in
which every new strain was recorded with some description as to
where it come from where it stands in the pedigrees. Barbara
Backmann has made very important use of those. The most
important information on those archives is already embodied in
the equal pedigrees which she has published and she's got copies
of most of those but I have found those of value. They date the
acquisition with a particular strain and that's probably one of
the best ways of pinning down when an experiment is done. So
that's in good shape; it's well indexed and I am very pleased
with that. So I have that for E. Coli, Bacillus, salmonella and
as I say they have been useful and they have already been
incorporated and published pedigrees. I have a couple of boxes
of video and audio tapes, films, a few things like that are
already deposited in the archives. I think we both agree that if
every scientist kept records with as much detail as this we would
have a much easier job. But indexing this materials is still a
hairy challenge and while others could do it obviously I adda
great deal myself and I'm trying to do that, putting as much as I
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can on the computer by way of annotations. I'm thinking of
getting an optical disk scanning system and doing that transfer
right here, it's obviously very costly but probably intrinsically
not much more than if we were doing it down at NLM and the
technology is reaching a point where it might be affordable and
particularly it's something that can be done on a spare time
basis. Indexing these papers could raise important issues so I'll
be very pleased if I can get to that within the next five years
or so. I don't feel ready to let these papers out of my own
hands at this stage and there are remarks about living
individuals. I'm putting an outer envelope which 99% of the time
which is more stringent than would be required but until I've had
a chance to access the situation, I don't regret this at this
time but will make provisions that everything will be handled
with appropriate discretion about when and so forth. So I have a
organized program for dealing with my papers but I think-as we
both agreed-that it would involve many people. I've been
frustrated many times in my own efforts to save Avery's papers,
papers that I know are gone-Avery, Francis Ryan, David Bonner-
essentially nothing will survive from them. The tip of the
Beadle Archives are not too wonderful-Judith Goodstein as you
know is at Caltech; very little is there and this is not very
satisfactory. I did a memoir of Ed Tatum and I've guarded
everything that there is and it's in the Rockefeller Archives and
its very unsatisfactory in details. So, for example, there's no
correspondence between Tatum and Beadle. It seems that that just 0 p4@0 Lisn't
there to give you an objective example of what's missing.

Well that's a quick summary.

MORRIS: Yes, a very encouraging summary. A lot of archivists
would be guaranteed work.

LEDERBERG: Oh yes, (laughter)

MORRIS: Do you pass this sensitivity toward documentation on to
your students?

LEDERBERG: Yes, I try. Well, I initiated the idea through the
Pew Scholars program by all means and I've encouraged the faculty
here. You might want to talk to Sonja Mirsky if you want to get
so picture, she's our librarian, curator of collections, and
she's usually been the person who's managed the archival program
here in the sense of facilitating, getting professor's papers
into the Archive Center, Darwin Stapleton is the director of it,
and he can give it to you from that end but Sonja knows more
about what the professors think and of what they actually do.
She can tell you of the collections they have actually received.
So it would be a good microcosm to get a good picture and you
would get some sense of the obstacle and frustrations as well as
successes in trying to get such materials. But the Avery stuff
for example was quite consciously discarded and he was very
positive of what he was doing; it was not just an accident. In
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other cases many professor's widows have been very reluctant,
they didn't know what was in there, afraid it might cast their
late husband in a bad light, or others, and so on. And so for
many of them, there is an emotional state that's involved--you've
seen this over and over again--or they don't have a place to put
them, so there is more lost than not. There's been a more
systematic effort since I was president of the university to make
sure that every professor would be contacted. This is not
telling them to change their behavior during their tenure but at
least the papers will not be gone when they retire or die.

MORRIS: So often it may not occur to scientists that anybody
wants his papers In one case, a private laboratory expected the
papers of the scientists who worked there to come to them, but
didn't necessarily convey this impression to the scientists, and
scientists just didn't do it. Of course in some biotech
companies, they know from day one the records stay with the
company, but it's a little bit harder in the freer world of
academic and private organizations. We've our modified
Documentation Guidelines into something similar to that for the
Pew scholars.

LEDERBERG: Why should they keep hard copies of electronic mail?
Wouldn't it be just as well if they kept them on machines-
readable media? The world changes but......

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MORRIS: If they deal with the problem with... yes, but in twenty
years you may not be able to read it and they don't always like
to clutter up their disk with correspondence. Even if they keep
it for a week or two they may erase it later.

LEDERBERG: Yes, but I think you want to add a little more about
that - other media. PC disks are going to be around for a long
time and well, not everybody may have readers, somebody will and
the point is just from the point of view of compactness and
searchability and so forth. Given the choice, I know from my own
papers, if I had a choice of what I've got now or of having them
all on disk, I'd throw them all on disk because of the search
capabilities.

LEDERBERG: What about quality of paper, you don't mention that?

MORRIS: No, of course the more rag content the better, the acid
content is a part of it.

LEDERBERG: The acid content, I think, deserves saying just a
word about that; it makes a big difference.

MORRIS: It would, yes,

LEDERBERG: And there are, as is nowadays you can use a Xerox

copy, there are copy papers that are not bad and others that are

‘1 p4@0 Oat least not certified. I mean it's a minor choice that makes a
big difference. (pause) Where is the pamphlet, "Why Save

Personal Papers"?

MORRIS: Unfortunately that's out of print. It was due in early
March, now they are saying early in April. No, I owe a lot of
people an updated copy of the brochure. (laughter)

LEDERBERG: Okay, will you check what archiving policies are in
different institutions, I know some universities are changing
them,, there was none at all at Stanford until about fifteen
years ago, now they make a systematic effort to get those
collections. Are there differences about what their
institutional policies are? Have you gotten a questionnaire out
yet?

MORRIS: No, I haven't done that yet.

LEDERBERG: University archivists could help; there is some sort
of network of them.

MORRIS: Yes. They all seem to vary. Some colleges don't want
papers. Like Bill Bailey's papers came to us because the

University of Maryland at College Park didn't want them.

various, considerably, but yes, some sort of questionnaire on
university archival policies would help to give us a better O p4@0 0
picture, a broader picture. We're testing the waters this
spring, we have a much more involved proposal pending. What we
don't get done this spring, we hope, if all goes as is proposed,
to do in the next couple of years.

LEDERBERG: Two suggestions about the Guidelines. Somewhere, I
think its important to have some reassurance that archivist well
understand that there may be problems of personal discretion,
it's not their business to try to hurt people and that you could
be certain that whatever arrangements you feel appropriate in
respect to personal discretion will be followed so to meet the
needs of history and matters of personal confidence; they are not
incompatible with one another.

MORRIS: No, that certain restrictions can be placed for a set
period of time.

LEDERBERG: And that there is a very good record of compliance.

I don't know of any example of any that may have been violated by
professional archives, it's a statement that would be worth
making. What are very important material, it's implied in many
reports, but I know that many times I would have ached to have
been able to have particular ones, are folders on recruitments,
when there is an advertised position, and you are collecting,
it's implicit in letters of reference, but I mean such a
concentrated base, search committee reports, search committee

O p4@0 Ufiles, not just the final reports - ones which aggregate the
views of the scientific network - many people want to know, "what
are you looking for? what is behind it" and the network of
understanding/appreciation, and evaluation of people viewed,
other people, and other events as recorded in those documents. I
think you might highlight that here.

MORRIS: I think you might have problems with that because people
automatically close such files, or these are closed because of
confidentiality.

LEDERBERG: Doesn't have to be forever though. They're closed
and it's said closed files are very admissible in archives and
rather than destroy them, just say they can't be opened for fifty
years. That would be honored.

MORRIS: Encourage them to think in terms of the next search
committee they are on, to lock the files for a certain group of
years.

LEDERBERG: That's right! Because they are so valuable.

Likewise grant reviews, not just your grant applications for

safekeeping. It's implicit in these referee reports but I would

expand upon it a little bit. And I think, some note that says we
understand that some of these are closed files, that should not

preclude their going into an archives for eventual availability HU p4@0 U
with whatever restrictions that are appropriate. (pause) Any
correspondence from your professional colleagues--it doesn't have
to be explicitly colloborative--would be worth saving.

MORRIS: We're trying to encourage information about
colloboration; perhaps "concerning" or "especially concerning" or
"for example concerning" would clarify this.

LEDERBERG: With any correspondence with professional colleagues
especially concerning corroborations.

MORRIS: I've had people tell me "well, if you look on the papers
and they are co-authors, there's your colloboration. What more
do you need to know?" There are a few things about the process,
the way in which it developed, but "we met at dinner one day and
it just sort of happened". There's so much for which there is no
record.

LEDERBERG: Seems self evident but you don't even have the word
dairy here. I guess anyone keeping a diary, doesn't need to be
told. (laughter). Yes, it's very personal. But I'll tell you
what's not here and again, believe it or not, something I would
ache to have kept because of the dates - appointment calendars.
I'll keep them a month at a time, then tear them up and throw
them away, and, wow, do I wish I had some of those, you know, who
I saw and when.

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MORRIS: That is the closest, I think, most people come to a
diary, the appointment calendar. This is true.

LEDERBERG: These I have, oh since about 1960, but not before
that. (pause) Lecture notes, they are not just class notes, but
notes on your unpublished lectures. It's not specifically
stated; those are often in the embryonic state and along with it
copies of slides and so forth, ......

MORRIS: A lot of people use overhead transparencies .....

LEDERBERG: Yes, I always keep a set of the .... I keep a little
trip report folder whenever I go someplace and give a talk or
have some event like that. It's the same folder my secretary
keeps for me, to take with me when I go there and have completed
a task, I strip out the junk and I always keep copies of whatever
I may have presented at that time so I can compare the statement
of what I was saying about the subject in January as compared to
May, compared to October.

MORRIS: Yes, Do you keep the transparency or do you keep a
printed copy?

LEDERBERG: No, I keep a paper printed copy. The transparencies
I keep together in one place because I use them over and over 0 p4@0 Dagain and
I modify then and so on.

MORRIS: That was something that came out through the Pew
Scholars; they mentioned that they used the transparencies and
the slides and most of their talk was the transparency.

LEDERBERG: You should go and date everything. And full dates,
month, day, and year - how I've struggled with some of my notes.
My old professor Francis Ryan used to put only the day of the
month on his notes. He had a hard cover notebook and you would
think that it would be unambiguous, most of the time it was.
(laughter) ......

MORRIS: And sometimes put the month and the day or the day and
the month

LEDERBERG: Remember to change your dates around the years
(laughter) ......

MORRIS: That can confuse life. (laughter)

LEDERBERG: It sure does!

MORRIS: So often that little bit of a date, that's all you have
and to try to figure out what it is but if you don't know which

is the month and which is the day....
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LEDERBERG: Yes, well you know that dates are crucial. Also if
you use initials to describe people, someplace if you got an
index, it would be of some help, you may want it yourself someday
(laughter) ... List of your students, laboratory staff? I'm not
sure I do that even now - I wish it every new year's - we compile
a roster of who was in the lab at that particular date - it's
usually reconstructed but sometimes with difficulty.

MORRIS: Yes, yes and a few years later it's even harder.

LEDERBERG: Until you have been through the process yourself.

The young person simply cannot understand the time will come when
the things that are obvious, crystal clear in every detail, will
become murky memories. They will not believe that, they will not
understand that so that's why I'm being very explicit about what
it is that needs to be attached to documents.

MORRIS: True, true, and how to decipher their own codes - if
they use their own shorthand and such.... And instrumentation,
is there any way to save a record of how some things done or is
that all in a scientific paper and research notes or...... ?

LEDERBERG: Well, it's for most purposes it's pretty cut and dry

if you are using commercial instrumentation. (pause) I've

really rarely found that a serious problem unless you are dealing UO p4@0 Owith
the history of an instrument - it in itself becomes the

issue and that needs special dealing. I suppose a lab notebook

should have as part of the appendix, what would be the record for

hardware used; say you did a spectrometry, then tacitly state

what it was used for. Instrumentation in itself is a serious

issue.

MORRIS: "Scaling Up" is our traveling exhibit which includes
some material on the instruments.

LEDERBERG: Oh, the history of instruments per se, that is
important specialty, but I'm not sure the individual investigator
can efficiently be relied (on for information on
instrumentation).

MORRIS: I think I'd be lucky if we get from them the instrument
they used -- the name of the instrument they used. It may be
that some where else will have to have the record of what the
instrument was.

LEDERBERG: Well, if it's important, it's usually in the paper,
if not the lab notes, there is almost always some material about
where the tracings came from. There must be some exceptions
there.

MORRIS: Of course. The Smithsonian's Ray Kondratus is doing
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some video-taped interviews, one with Leroy Hood. There will be
a record of that sort instrumentation.

LEDERBERG: Well, instrumentation is the focus I would assume
that very much will be built into the lab notebook.

MORRIS: In a discussion of the methodology procedure it should
be noted somewhere.

LEDERBERG: I would think that an admonition shouldn't have to be
there but the records of the strain -- E. Coli--is much better;
Barbara Bachmann's effort has centralized the source of so much
of the material -- much better than other people who say they use
strain so and so. You don't have a clue what the code numbers
mean, taken in or out of one of those so that's why everybody's
got their own private catalog. I had five thousand E. Coli of
which a couple of hundred were of wide interest and use. Barbara
knows all about it and keeps a detailed listing.

MORRIS: Where is Barbara?

LEDERBERG: Yale - E. Coli stock culture collection, that's being
computerized now. E. Coli strains are in fairly good shape

because of her efforts; she also publishes the maps every few

years. She's getting on, she's about seventy now, we don't look

forward cheerfully to how it's going to go without her, she's has UL) p4@0
Odevoted most of her life to that; she's done a wonderful job.

I've been trying to get better recognition for the service she's

done.

MORRIS: No hope for an assistant in the wings that she could
start grooming?

LEDERBERG: It won't be quite like her. Mary Bolynn is taking
over the computerization of it--that would be the next best; such
deep personal knowledge and enthusiam of involved there. I don't
know that anyone will have the dedication that she had. It's not
just a matter of accepting what people deposit; it's a matter of
going back to them and saying, "look, what you just sent me
doesn't really make total sense, you must left out something in
that pedigree" (laughter). She has been very meticulous.

MORRIS: The depth of knowledge that she has would be

irreplaceable. You would have to sit her down with a tape
recorder and let her talk to herself.

LEDERBERG: Well, Mary's trying to communicate some of that in
the way they are structuring the data base. They will at lease
get all of her 3x5 cards in there with the code number's name.

MORRIS: There is the craft aspect of science!

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LEDERBERG: Yes, maybe an experienced interviewer, under the
guise of oral history, could spend 3-4 days with her you might
get a lot more - that would otherwise be more available.

Somebody would have to do their homework in getting started on
that process. I think she would be a very good target for all
kinds of research. You know she knows everybody in the field;
she's been around forever. Well, she's not herself regarded as a
preeminent scientist, but regarded as the center of an
incomparable service.

MORRIS: The support people - in effect, the indispensable
support people.

LEDERBERG: She's been very modest about it.

MORRIS: We'll have to change that. There is so much in a lab
that happens; that there are frequently other people in addition
to the co-authors of a paper who've been involved with something,
the technicians and -----

LEDERBERG: Sure, I'm not optimistic about getting full records
about what goes on at moments of inspiration and so on-- I had a
few efforts that tried to tract that and I'll give you a working
paper related to that issue -- I had two graduate students -- I
had joint appointments so they were both my students, one was in
computer science and one was in microbial genetics. They worked U p4@0
Otogether for a few months trying to track the conversations in
our weekly lab meetings and trying to gather something about the
dynamics of insight instead of just watching it. I think we both
despaired (laughter) of really being able to get it all down. We
didn't have a video camera which would have been some help in
retracing. They couldn't take notes fast enough. When we had an
insight, post-insight the words weren't the same thing. It's the
usual problem; it's hard to tell historical insight. We went
over some cases in some detail. At the critical moments, things
were moving so fast, in a few seconds there was such a change of
view about how to look at the problem; it's very, very hard to
track it. We're doing here a research program that's closely
connected with that and, again, I have a computer scientist and
when I was an assistant professor at Rutgers - he comes up here
once a week. We are trying to develop expert systems that can do
reasoning in molecular biology, trying to extract the core
elements of how we go about modeling starting with DNA structure,
information transfer and so forth. And trying to put that ina
data base system. In part of doing that we work through the
current laboratory challenges and problems and the board gets
full of networks and how to resolve problems, exhaust all the
logical possibilities and so on. So we're emulating what we want
the computer to do -- which in turn is emulating what we're
doing. Again it's tough going trying to capture what we're doing
-- and it's easier in our own situation in that we learned to
stop and self-consciously ask and say, whoa -- how did we reach

O p4@e0 O
our present view -- so we're willing to have to have time out,

it's partly the reason of the effort. We may lose some of the

spontaneity as the price is getting a bit more rigor for a more
detailed record.....

MORRIS: It will be more of a record and more snatches of
spontaneity than just the research notes and published
paper ......

LEDERBERG: I was just talking with, you may know his name, Jan
Sapp, have you run into his work? He's written a book about
Moewus lately and before that Beyond the Gene. He's a historian,
cum philosopher of science; he's involved now in symbiosis. I've
just invited him to spend a year as a resident participant, as a
visiting associate professor. He comes professionally from that
discipline. His two purposes are one, what we can get out of
him; and two, I wanted him to have a year next to a working lab
and get a better grounding in what actually goes on ina
laboratory.

MORRIS: That's the only way to really learn -- to be in there.

LEDERBERG: So, there'll still be more going on with that like
this next year ? I want to make sure that he visits down in
Philadelphians and see all the things you do. But you may want
to see his last book (shows Dr. Morris the book), the first is U p4@0 Ucalled
Beyond the Gene, Where the Truth Lies: Franz Moewus and

the Origins of Molecular Biology, Cambridge University Press.
That has a lot on his earlier issue of biochemical genetics he's
very thorough with Beadle & Tatum. Moewus was a German
investigator and published stuff during the War that was not
fully accessible -- in many ways anticipated a great deal of what
Beadle & Tatum had done //// he worked on but on the other hand,
there has been grave doubts as to whether most of the data was
fabricated so there is that set of issues -- the confrontations
////// and so forth -- but /// a lot of commentaries of people -
sometimes a bit too much history (laughter) but it's just so
pertinent to the general area. He's coming here for a year.

MORRIS: One topic I'd like to touch upon with you -- proposals.
Do you keep records of old proposals; how about the proposals
that don't get funded the first time?

LEDERBERG: Especially those -- (laughter) I have a pretty
complete file on those. I had to go back to NIH to get a couple
of their earliest ones -- but they dug them out of the archives
for me. (laughter).

MORRIS: Today, when you write a paper is it on the computer, or
paper and pencil?

LEDERBERG: No way, it's drafted on the computer, I mean pieces
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of it may be paper and pencil -- pieces may be dictated but I'll
usually prepare an outline then dictate from that, and ask Jane
to put that in the computer and then I personally revise it on
the computer.

MORRIS: Do you have a draft, do you keep the drafts or do you
just keep the final version?

LEDERBERG: If there are very significant changes I keep
different versions of it.

MORRIS: On disk or hard copy?

LEDERBERG: Sometimes hard copy. I've got a pretty careful
archiving system on the machinable materials. I'm trying to move
more and more to it. I mentioned a scanner and I may do that,
I'm certainly going to get an optical disc storage, which I think
is a little more reliable. I can't believe that there won't be
readers for that for some time to come.

MORRIS: It's so new they really made really marketable for
widespread use just yet.

LEDERBERG: It's more accessible than you think -- I mean the
prices are not that high, people just haven't gotten use to it, I
found that out and discussion of the science citation index on
CD-rom which most people I talk to think "oh my, its very 0 p4@0 U
expensive hardware." The hardware is trivial; the cost of the

disc is enormous (laughter), as you may have discovered. But

I'm using that constantly but an ordinary PC and $700 disc reader
now cost you a couple or $3,000 for read and write capability on
optical disk. That's coming down pretty fast.

MORRIS: Within time it's getting more and more accessible?

LEDERBERG: I think it's there now. Scanners are a little more
expensive. The cost there is in feeding them sheet by sheet.

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MORRIS: And the preparation sequence -- the joyous labor of
intensive activities. How about your records as president of
Rockefeller University; are they all in your papers or are they
elsewhere?

LEDERBERG: The administrative records are kept separately - they
are archived and again with the usual restrictions. We have a
systematic program of archiving - not just mine but some of the
other officers of the university at least we did during my
regime. (laughter) And Darwin's very much unpopular on top of
that.

MORRIS: I have a feeling that Rockefeller University's going to
be pinnacle of institutional procedures.

LEDERBERG: We probably are; I mean if you would consider that we
are a fairly small place, we have the Rockefeller Archive Center
which because of the association with the family in that
historical importance and it's very well endowed. That puts us
in to an environment that is very, very encouraging and so to
have the Rockefeller Archive Center with its enormous scope and
capability for an institution that's as small as us is one of the
reasons why what you say may be true. What's lacking here is a
department of history of science or Beckman Center or some more
concerted institutional activity by doing things with that but
the RAC is the equivalent of that.0 p42 0
MORRIS: And if the scientists are encouraged to save their
papers then there is a far greater likelihood that they will if
the procedures are presented to them.

LEDERBERG: Well, you might talk to Sonja about that; I've even
forgotten what we did. I know I had been contemplating, I talked
to Darwin about that -- sending a memo to existing professors --
not just ~don't throw your papers away before you go' - but have
an active program right -- I don't remember what he said, if that
was implemented - I'm not sure if he'd gone the whole way in
terms of raising the consciousness in our faculty. You know,
personally, I've talked to some of the young people, a few of
them say yes, you are going to be very famous someday (laughter).
People are going to write some history and one or two said save
your own records. I just don't remember how much we've done for
the rest of the professors in terms of the current records
keeping activity. Are you going to try to see her ? this visit

MORRIS: I hadn't planned to -- I will try to get in touch with
you again.

LEDERBERG: Do you have time? I can get her on the phone right

now! She is the widow of a professor at the University (Albert
Mirsky) - so she's been close into full academic part in the

O p4@0 Cinstitution. She's about ready to retire now -- her sense of
history generally is unusual for someone in her position.

MORRIS: Is there anything that I haven't asked you about...... ?

LEDERBERG: Oh! I don't think so .... this doesn't just come out
of the blue for either of us and if anything else comes up I'll
get in touch with you.....

MORRIS: Thank you very much. James Poupard, I think. I met the
part-time archivist very briefly and I'm trying to find out how
I'm going to get in touch with her again. But yes...

LEDERBERG: A few years ago - I haven't heard much of this lately
- the Genetic Society of America pushing something like this but
I haven't heard a thing about it in quite a few years. Dave
Perkins, ? then the President ? - he's a biology department,
Stanford - (inaudible). John Drake, he's the editor of the
Journal and he certainly has a well honed historical prospective.
Either Hartwell or Drake would be the people to ask about or
heard about this lately - I don't see much else here in terms

of .... there is no reference of a committee of that sort, it
might be in other documents not this one. Has the APS gone pro-
active in this regard?

MORRIS: Only to the extent that Dave Rhees called me and said 0 p4@0 O
that if I find papers they'd be delighted to take them...

LEDERBERG: So they've announced that they are willing recipients
but they don't provide guides to scientists ......

MORRIS: I don't think so, no

LEDERBERG: John Ennis, an institution in England ..... There's
something called the Mendel Newsletter. Have you ever run into
that?

MORRIS: No.

LEDERBERG: That's on the subject we're addressing -- through
historical materials in genetics. --

[END OF TAPE]
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