pFanfpeed CLevyece CL G.; THE ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY 1230 YORK AVENUE NEW YORK, NY 10021 February 13, 1980 JOSHUA LEDERBERG PRESIDENT Dr. Wayne C. Jaeschke Vice President-Environmental Services Stauffer Chemical Company Westport, Connecticut 06880 Dear Wayne: Thank you for your letter of January 22nd. I might have replied sooner but had a rather nasty bout with the flu which only just now lets me get back to the office. I certainly do appreciate your interest, and intel- lectual, moral and perhaps material support for our efforts in comparative toxicology. Thank you for the lead. on Jansen's paper which I will follow up. I did also just re- ceive the report from CIIT that formaldehyde induces nasal carcinomas in rats but not mice; and I hope it will be possible for Goldberg to pursue this beyond the futility of condemning a compound as soon as a positive result is achieved in a single species. As to Sam Epstein's underlying queStions: It is not easy to characterize the distribution of the NCI budget, since so much of the work on cancer is inherently inter- disciplinary and cuts across convenient categories. You probably are already very familiar with it but I am enclos- ing a copy of the recent NCI Fact Book that attempts to give some perspective on the distribution of funds. The NCI pro- gram is by no means just research; within the research budget I would suggest that substantially more than 10% goes into "mechanistic studies" but this is far below the level needed to saturate the urgent problems. In fact one serious diffi- culty is a possible over~reaction on the part of HEW, in the establishment of the National Toxicology Program which now has an enormous budget for the "identification of carcino- gens". There are real grounds for skepticism as to the validity of the labels established by current test procedures; and of course they generally end up telling us almost nothing about mechanism or the biological theory of cancer. This is Dr. Wayne C. Jaeschke February 13, 1980 -2- going to receive my most critical attention as I try and dig into understanding just what the National Cancer strategy really is. I would, of course, be happy to hear from ABC in any way that is convenient to them: if you just let me know where they are located I'd be glad to get the hall rolling with my own telephone call. You mentioned a recent sym- posium and if there is any summary of that that might be most helpful. Be all means I look forward to sustaining this dia- logue and have been glad to meet a number of people in in- dustrial laboratories who plainly are doing most important work of practical consequence in this field at the present ~ time. I have a couple of other enclosures for you which you may be interested to hear although I suspect that they are not news to you. eee Joshua Lederberg + Encls.