THE INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

SCHOOL OF MATHEMATICS March 14, 1955

Dear Professor Lederberg:

I have done some work on the question of self-
reproduction, but I would consider it very incomplete. It
amounts to describing an automaton which has thas property,
but I think that the terms of the discussion and the methods
introduced will not be particularly surprising to a geneticist.

I am writing up these considerations now in detail
and finishing this will take some time. However, I published
a sketch of this work in one of the contributions to the "Hixon
Symposium", held at the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena, on September 20, 1948. (This is one of the articles
in the volume on the proceedings of that colloquium. The volume
is entitled "Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior", L.A. Jeffres,
editor, published by John Wiley, New York, 1951. The title of
the article is, "The General and Logical Theory of Automata". )
I have only three reprints of this paper left, but if you have
any difficulty in getting hold of the publication, I will be
glad to send you a reprint on loan. I would also be very
interested to learn anything you would care to communicate
about your own ideas on this subject.

Yours sincerely,

(prem er OV Ae

John von Neumann
JvNeg

Professor Joshua Lederberg
Department of Genetics

The University of Wisconsin
Madison 6, Wisconsin