June 1, 1956

Dear Norton:

Your phone call yesterday mat heave been as upsetting &b me as
it was to you; I hope I am right in thinking it was made in the heat
of the moment and that the air will have cleared before you visit
Madison, which IT am looking forward to very much. I was flabbergas$ed
that you should have responded as you did to what I thought was merely
a small courtesy, sending you that ms. before I had confided in anyone
else about it, but I am trying to visualize the basis of the misunder—
standing, Obviously you have been much more aeeply committed to work
on protoplasts than I had dmagined: Rollin had told me simply thet you
had gotten sone promising leads, but you couldn't really get at it
seriously until the fall (and, what I couldn't understand, that your
intentions must be keep a deep secret): I hoped the penicillin-sucrose
approach would be of some use to you, and to anyone else interested in
manifold problems of protoplasts. If I had knowm what you told me now,
that you were really well along and deeply involved at the monent, I
might have contacted you sooner, but should I have discussed the matter
preferentially with you rather than anyone else working on protoplasts,
e.g. Sol? In fact I am very uneasy about not having sent that notice
to Sol, but as I promised to congeal the situation, I won't until your
visit, or unless you iamm are willing to release me fron that promise,
I had mentioned to Sol that I had stumbled inho something like pboto-
plasts in E, coli and would send him sane specific details in a few days,
&%s Anyhow, Esther and I will be flying to Baltimore on Sunday June 17;
we hope you can manage to spend at least a day with us, so least us know
when and where to meeé you,

Meanwhile, I hope you will weigh the merite of a more candid and casual
approach. I know Rollin prefers to play his cards close to the chest, and
of course that's his affair, but I hate to see you fall into the seme trap.
Just one unfortunate result of that strategy is precisely that it encourages
an emotional involvement with intellectual "personal property", You have
too many ideas and telents to have to be jealous of them, and in the long
run secrecy doesn't work anyhow unless you propose to lock your lab door,
estrange your friends, and enforce a moratobium on everyone else's imagination,
We all have ego-centered motivations in our scientific work youtve heard
my poser, how many people would endure research if all publication were
atrictly anonymous? and we have to recognize them in order to c@pe with
them, to use them as gonatructive drives. But if you don't think the facts
of selence are more important than the feelings of scientists, we have no
commen basis for this discussion, The most immoral suggestion I ever heard
was that a fact of general interest should be suppressed, not to sonsolidate
it, but for purely personal reasons,
Norton, I wouldn't want to ‘hurt’ you, and I just don't see how I
have in any tangible way. Did you think I stole some of your ideas?
is there anything about any mysterious rabbit tissue extract in the
paper (of whose effectiveness neither you nor Rollin gave more than
the vaguest hint)?—In fact, I was reading Dienes' paper in J, Bact
this spring when it struck me that he needed hypertonic media for his
L-forms, and these were onviocusly analogous to protoplasts; so when
Rollin wes here, I asked him whether he had ever happened to try penicillin
+ sucrose in combination, (I was speaking to his background on antibiotics,
leaky bacteria, and penictllin-lysis), He didn't know, so I tried it on
a Saburdey afternoon with resplts that were rather startling to me (however
they may compare with youre, which I know next to nothing about). This
kind of an effect sees to have too general an interest to be sat on, on
my view, so I spent a few weeksd polishing up a quick survey just so you
and everybody else could take advantage of it, for whatever use it¢ may
be in its manifold aspects, The paper I wrote on it is far from exemplary,
but I'm not trying to prove damything, just put the technime on the mar
ket for publie consumption, Naturally thebe are some aspects I would like
to try to exploit further, but I have no hope of maintaining a fencearound
any part of the garden.-~ Is there anything very original about using
protoplasts? Or aren't we hoth aping Sol more than a little? I know I
was tremendeasly stimulatdd by his eecount at Detroit; probably I would
never have systematically looked for E. eoli protoplasts, but an idea for
tying them together with I-forms seemed worth following up a bit, especially
if it can help explain the m/o of penicillin (which, by the way has caught
the interest of some of Marv' Hohnson's students; onm was in this PM to show
me some protoplasts he had made from a penicillin-sensitive B. subtilis.)

You have had every right to sit on your own eggs t111 you felt they
were ready to hatch, and not knowing how ripe they were the penicillim
ms, might have threatened to be an uninbantional 'scofp'. This is easily
rectified, and I would be delighted if you would consider writing up your
own material now for publication prior to or cotemporal with my note, or
any other way you want to handle it. I earnestly want to try to persuade
you of this tactic, if you're ready, and urge you to bring e draft along
such lines with you, whether you're entirely convinced yet or not, If you
have any other proposal, I went to hear it, but I don't think I would be
very sympathetic to suppressing the information about penicillin (and its
too far along the grapevine by now anyhow). This seems like the most con-
structive course but I really don't know just what you have now, and you'll
best judge thet yourself. If you decide not po publish now what will you
have Jost by the time you are ready?

What I am going to write now is something of a lecture, but I couldn't help
but be disappointed in what you said about Demebee over the phone, We both
wish he would do a less messy job with parte of his work on transduction,
but do you regret what he has added to it? He's "taken over" transduction
by an energetic program which for all of ite blunderbuse 1s turning up sane
remarkable contributions; he doesn't claim to have discovered the technique,
and x& he 1s putting it to good use. None of this has depreciated your role
in it, on the contrary it has focussed much more attention on transduction
than it might otherwise have received. Instead of crabbing about it, do better
yourself, as I know you can do if your work on that phage-host interaction
is as sound and beautiful as my impression of it, It would be very won~
venient for our ulcers if we had private gardens in acience, but if you're
going to work in a popular field, you have to cope with, in fact encourage,
populab interest in it. If the intellectual exercise is your only motiva-
tion, and you can't stand the gaff, you'll have to work on something which
is (by definition) "less important’, I regret the tensions of competition
as much as you do (and have had my share of nonsense and brilliance in it
too), and we learn to accomodate one another to smoothe it dom, but if you
have what it takes, what can you lose? If it's integrity and caution that
slow you dow compared to the hotrod beys, you have to learn the price too,
and comfort yourself with your owm self-respect, but I hope in the long
run that the sane integrity is the only way to build up the loglasting
esteem of your colleagues too, And I don't see what you've lost right

now either,

I'm sorry you won't be at the Baltimore shindig, and that I'l] mise
you at CSH. I've been too busy myself to think of attending both (my main
preoccupation when I'm not writing overlong letters to Norton being the
incredibly camplex job of assimilating the data for the 'trails’ paper)
or of contributing to either, There are some remarkable flubs in the
choices of speakers at both meetings, particularly in the area of trans-
duction (phage or DNA), but the proles need a break too,

My own work lately has been largely on the properties of different
Hire; Larry is cleaning up the vbrology of lambda-transduction (burst sizes,
especially, which zum interestingly enough comes out about one Gal+ per
yielding cell, presumably the fragment of the original chranosane, while
the Lp region only replicates qua phage); but worst of all, Kalekar has been
enzymologizing the Gal mutants and claims that Gal;, Gal, and Gal, lack
the second step, UDGP transferase, while Galo misses galactokinase, Shades
of Demerec! We don't have the sequence, but 1,4 and 7 are in one posétion-
effect group; 2 (and 3} abe in another, (trans- heterogenotes within a group
are galactose-negative).
Sfneere’ys
: /

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