SL:

March 22, 1973

Notes on conversation with Arthur Kornberg on route from Washington
to San Francisco.

This was a discussion concerning the origins of his. interest in the
enzymology of DNA synthesis. He expressed his annoyance at two trends
(1) the attribution that he decided to go into DNA work in consequence
of Watson and Crick's formulation of its structure in 1953 and (2) that
people like Luria, and I think he also mentioned Delbrick, set themselves
up as the philosophers of the new biology and left it to the biochemist
to merely work out the details. He was particularly critical with respect
to the way that Delbrilck used to shrug off any biochemical work of any
description ignoring in particular the contributions that Seymour Cohen
had made. In fact, Arthur himself seems to have been remarkably oblivious
about the importance of DNA, but in this respect he was really not very
different from my own recollective experience of people like David Green
since there were very few biochemists interested in metabolism who strayed
very far from intermediary metabolism in their investigations.

Arthur dates the beginning of his interest in DNA to his studies
with Daft in nutrition and especially the effects of folic acid deprivation.