July 20, 1973

Dr. Orio Ciferri
Istituto di Genetica
Universita di Pavia
27100 Pavia ITALY

Dear Orio,

Let me first thank you again for your wonderful care upon ny
early arrival and during my short day in Milan and Pavia. You and
Paula always treat me so well that I am surprised I do not take more
advantage of it.

It would have been a very good idea to try to get back to Italy
after the meeting in Geneva, but Marguerite had to postpone coming to
Europe until her back-problem cleared up which it eventually did. So,
we met then in Paris and the timing and place just did not work out
very well to continue with the plan of crossing the Alps again. I hope
it will be possible for us to try this again sometime before too long.

While I was away I had already asked my secretary to prepare a
citation index to my own publications and that made it easy to find
the answer to your question about early references to ‘curing’ algae
of their chloroplasts. I am enclosing a xerox-copy of the first place
I could find such a remark. In addition, you will see it mentioned
in passing at the bottom of page 406 of my review article in Physiological
Reviews 1952. And I have also made other references to it from time to
time in later papers. ,

LI haven't gone over all my notes and there may be other questions
that had been raised during our discussion that I will come to again.
The funding situation here is still somewhat uncertain. I did get a
letter that the renewal of our basic laboratory grant in microbial genetics
had been approved by the council but without the increase that I had
requested. In addition, they were not able to tell me definitely that it
would be funded on time, so I am afraid I still have to put off a little
while longer the question of whether we would be able to finance your
support during a visit. As we discussed I will let you know as quickly
as we can give definite information, and I hope you will be making at
least tentative plans to be over here for a month or two. We can put those
into effect from our end as soon as we get further word, but the situation
about health research funding in Washington is a matter of really terrible
confusion as you may see from one of the enclosures.

With all the best,
Sincerely yours,

Joshua Lederberg

Professor of Genetics
JL/rr

Enclosures