SEP 4 1969
RESEARGH CORPORATION

405 LEXINGTON AVENUE, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10017

KENDALL W. KING
ASSISTANT VICE PRESIDENT—GRANTS

August 28, 1969

Dr. Joshua Lederberg

Department of Genetics

Stanford University School of Medicine
Palo Alto, California 94304

Dear Dr. Lederberg:

Dr. Hal H. Ramsey, this foundation's Western
Regional Director, occasionally sends me clippings of your
Science and Man articles from the Chronicle. I have enjoyed
them doubly because of their airing of crucial contemporary
problems relating to the position of science in society as
a whole and because of their jogging of my memory of the
early 50's when your course at Madison in Microbiol Genetics
was the intellectual delight of my graduate work. You have
my belated thanks.

Without implying it to be in any sense the exclu-
sive cause of the abuse of science in the contemporary scene,
it has seemed increasingly clear to me that one major facet
of the problem is the intellectual isolation of sclentists-
in-training from both the general world of thought and from
the common affairs of society. Beginning in the late under-
graduate years and throughout graduate and postdoctoral
education the vast majority of our scientists devote essen-
tially all of their efforts to the narrow subject matter of
their fields. If they take time for general reading,
reflection and thought it is stolen.

The end result is a man astonishingly naive in
the areas of philosophy, ethics, and the humanities and
incapable of understanding economic and political thought.
He is inarticulate with most of the world, and really has
little to say of any substance because of 10-odd years of
disassociation with the non-scientific world.

Sometime around 35 or 40 he begins intuitively to
wonder at society's misuse of science and to chafe under his
own incapacity to find means by which he and his discipline
can gain relevance and power,

A FOUNDATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE
Dr. Joshua Lederberg -2- August 28, 1969

It seems to me important that this deficit in
science education be corrected and that a foundation such
as ours ought to be in the best possible position to imple-
ment experiments in that direction.

I would be keenly interested in your reaction to
both whether the general gist of my thought is valid, and
if so what moves in a constructive direction might be
appropriate to foundations.

Sincerely yours,

  

Kendall WwW.
KWK: JE
ec: Dr. H. H. Ramsey