February 6, 1967

Professor Lucien Balllaud
Faculte des Sciences Botanique
4, rue Ledru

67 Clermont-Ferrand

France

Dear Profesaor Baillaud:

Thank you for your interesting comment expressed in your letter of
December 1.

Iam afraid I find it rather difficult to answer your question. The
terms of your own letter will help illustrate the difficulty. It is
obvious that you yourself had a definite reaction to the paper, but it
is hard for me to know just what that reaction is. Furthermore, it
would require a very intimate acquaintanceship to be able to ascertain
your religious or philosophical position. I am afraid then it would
be as difficult to do the research you indicate on others as it would
be for me to classify the datum that your own letter represents.

GW 7T1W9

If I may be permitted an intuition, however, it is that many readers
will react to an article like this somewhat paradoxically at different
levela of conscious and unconscious reception. Many will not really
know what they themselves think about the issues that I have attempted
to bring up for more deliberate analysis and discussion. ,

I hope I can emphasize the first sentence of the last paragraph of my
paper.

Yours cordially,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics

P.S. It may be some mitigation of the stridency of a discussion like
this to point out that the prescriptions that we make for the education
of the next generation differ only in method, not in aim, from the
biological proposals discussed in my article.

AL: P~(35