March 12, 1973

Dr. S.E. Luria

Department of Biology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139

Dear Salva,

Thank you very much for encouraging Sarkar to come to see me.
His experimental work is extremely interesting and it is obvious that
he is now leading the field. I have had some relationship through WHO
in trying to encourage work along these lines and I will certainly
see to it that he gets every boost possible.

As I discussed with him, however, there are practical problems,
even assuming that the basic scientific and technological issues can
be worked out, that will probably impede the widespread use of
immunological approaches. These have to do mainly with the unlikelihood
that immunizations with a limited number of inoculations can achieve
anything like the,,.iability that is available from other methods.
From the standpoint of personal, voluntary access to population control
any ambiguity about one's fertility is obviously a serious impedément.
Also at a more scientific level there are likely to be problems in
relating systemic immunity to the level of antibody that appears in the
secretions of the reproductive tract where they must be in order to be
effective.

Nonetheless, this is such an important area touching on so many
aspects of medicine and human biology that I have no doubt that it
should be vigorously pursued.

I wonder though whether you have thought through your own advocacy
of research in this area. I bring this up as a test of what you mean by
your mandate of the ethical responsibility of the scientist. It seems to
me that immunological means of sterilization pose a much more serious
potential threat of the imposition of federal control over reproductive
behavior than any of the areas of genetic control that have been so
widely discussed. In fact, even Sarkar is on the verge of advocating that
this be the method to be pursued for a more or less involuntary enrollment
of people in the developing countries to nationally imposed policies about
population control. So there may beally be some tangible reality, and before
too many years have gone by, to this kind of possibility. Furthermore, for
these purposes it whll be less important if the sterilizing procedure is
only 952 effective. In addition, we have the historical parallel -- if
you read the Nuremberg Trials you will see the rather silly attempt that
were made at one time, in response to a suggestion by a fool Podkorny, to
develop a chemical sterilant. Will you still encourage Sarkar to continue
with his experiments knowing of these possibilities of political perversion
of his findings? For my part I would find it difficult to draw a line that

-2-
Dr. S.E. Luria -2-+ 3/12/73

would justify raising great alarm about "genetic engineering" and was
acquiescent about the much more nearly realizable hazards of "reproductive
engineering” but I am not trying to press my views on you but to find out
how you have learned to deal with these distinctions.

Sincerely yours,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics

JL/rr