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4 SCHOOL OF MEDICINE
i STANFORD UNIVERSITY, STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 04305

JOSHUA LEDERBERG
JosEPH D. Grant PROFESSOR March 6, 1978
OF GENETICS

Dr. Samuel J. Ajl

Vice President for Research

The National Foundation-March of Dimes
1275 Mamaroneck Avenue

White Plains, New York 10605

Dear Sam:

It is my pleasure and privilege to write to you on behalf of
Dr. Douglas Wallace, Assistant Professor of Genetics, and currently
an applicant to a Basil O'Conner Starter Research Grant.

Dr. Wallace has been a member of this faculty for about a
year and a half, the culmination of an extremely stringent national-
even international - search for the best available young person in
his field of somatic cell genetics having a bearing on applications
to clinical problems. Even at the time of his appointment he has
impressed us with his independence and maturity as an investigator
and he has certainly borne out our every expectation in the way
that he has remounted a demanding and complex laboratory for research
in that field. He has shown himself to be extraordinarily imaginative
in the creation of new research directions and energetic in their
implementation. The work that he proposes to begin — and substan-
tially earlier with your help than could otherwise be the case -
is a brilliant insight that could uncover a whole new domain of
inherited disease and certainly deserves your urgent and sympathetic
consideration. As you know, I will be leaving Stanford University
in a few months. I can be quite proud of having had a part in
getting people like Gus Nossal and Walter Bodmer first recognized
and then well-started on their independent careers. I firmly
believe that Doug Wallace is of comparable caliber and that the
world will know it in a very few years.

Yours sincerel

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