- RESEARCH CORPORATION

405 LEXINGTON AVENUE, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10017

KENDALL eellin
ASSISTANT VICE PRESIDENT—GRANTS

October 2, 1969

Professor Joshua Lederberg
Department of Genetics

Stanford University Medical Center
Stanford, California 94305

Dear Professor Lederberg:

Thanks ever so much for your response of September 11 along
with C. G. Jung's comments, the proposal for an Undergrad-
uate Program in Human Biology at Stanford, and the announce-
ment of Nobel Symposium 14.

You made a couple of specific suggestions which we might
fruitfully discuss further. First, the stipend problem for
David Sachs. I am not highly optimistic but would be happy
to bring it before our staff for consideration if you would
provide me with more information on his background, his
professional aspirations, and the course of study he would
be pursuing.

You also mentioned a program of "fellowships-in-situ." I am
nibbling but I am not yet hooked. I am leery of the restric-
tion of such a program to scientists with "well established
credentials." There are a number of reasons for this
cautiousness. First, people of that stature in the scientific
community do not seem to me to be particularly lacking in
opportunities to explore privately and publicly their
thoughts. Second, people with such credentials would, I fear,
for the most part represent the Establishment of science, and
these very men have a relatively poor record to point to in
connection with developing a science that can grapple with
the human conditions. I would be a little more inclined to
look for youngsters in their thirties with solid but perhaps
less established credentials where one would be applying the
bellows to hotter coals. I do not mean this in any way to be
critical of you and your colleagues. Rather, what I mean to
be doing is countering with the suggestion that perhaps the

A FOUNDATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE

 
Professor Joshua Lederberg
Stanford University Medical Center

October 2, 1969
Page 2

need of such a fellowship among men of your position is much
less than the need to bring the promising youngsters into a
position where their thinking can develop in the direction
yours has followed.

I have looked at the Stanford curriculum proposals with a
great deal of interest. Frankly, it looks like a very
promising development. My only concern, and this may reflect
simply my ignorance of the accomplishments of some of your
colleagues, would be with the subject matter's solidity
(that is a nasty piece of jargon but I hope you get the
message) for the treatment of such topics as population,
food and environment, nutrition and agriculture. I have
wrestled with these for ten or eleven years now as I fell
from the company of the enzymological archangels to those
inhabitants of the Dark Country who were concerned with the
problem of eradicating clinical malnutrition from among the
peasantries of the Caribbean and Latin America. My own role
has not been very important but the success of the effort
has been, and demonstrates quite clearly that an amino acid
analyzer out of Beckman/Spinco has a very real relevance to
fatal malnutrition in the preschool child if you just use

it right. I am enclosing a couple of reprints that may be
of interest to you in that connection. The ones that are
numbered should perhaps best be read in that order.

Sincerely yours,

.
po

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Kendall W. King
KWK : GG
Enclosures