Mareh 4, 1975

Dr. Harriet Zuckerman
Department of Sociology
Fayerweather

Columbia University

New York, New York 10027

Dear Harriet,

While you were enjoying yourselfies discussing the science indicators
manuscript and particularly having the benefit of Yehuda’s company, I was
going through a rather stressful experience at Asilomar as you might have
predicted. There was so much "sociology" going on that I really do regret
that you were not able to be there. You would certainly have been fascinated
by the substance of the evente and even conceivably might have been willing
to make a contribution, potentially an enormous one, to the clarity of the
outcome,

I have been in some turmoil over the whole matter and as a way of
helping to set my thoughts straight have dictated a number of memoranda
for my own benefit which, however, I think I should share with you as
the beginning of a historical inquiry. It is really important that those
tapes be on the record, and I will indead be communicating with Stetten
to ensure that he seas some way of keeping them preserved. I do not know
what argument there might be for them to be part of the public record if
there were to be some scholarly interest in them and I suspect it would
not be too difficult to get permission to listen to them provided they
were not explicitly rebroadcast. Certainly the news reporters were also
permitted to keep their own taperecorders on during the entire proceedings.

I am going to note here also certain other documents that should be
included in the package to be mailed to you. They include the initial letter
to Science; the invitation to the meeting; part or all of the Ashby Committee
report; the task force reports and the final provisional one. I will also
have a few newspaper clippings that bear on some of the discussion and a few
miscellaneous notes of my own that I had taken as I went along. I hope this
is not too technical for you to understand the gist of what was really going
on from the standpoint of the social and political iseves. I very much feel
the need for some further critical dialogue to try and help sort out some
more of the very complicated issues that were being exchanged there. It really
was rather bewildering and I am still not certain that I understand ewerything
that was going on quite apart from not being privy to all of the factual
inputs relevant to the situation. It seems in fact as {f Paul Berg is really
quite angry with me for what may have seemed like Oo ¢/1-u/+r" > behavior on
my part; I have to say that I think he has been less than’ candid with me in
informing me of all the considerations that were in his mind in trying to
week the ends that I have been analyzing in the attached memoranda.

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Dr. Harriet Zuckerman -2- 3/a/75

I also have the sense that he is less than fully sensitive in his foresight
about the way in which good intentions will become translated into public
understanding and into bureaucratic enforcement. We still have to see what
the outcome of that is going to be. Fortunately, there are at least one or
two members of the advisory committee who are more concerned about that
than Paul is, for he does have his own agenda and who told me theye were
indeed grateful to me for having raised a number of the fussy issues that

I summarized in the memorandum, So, perhaps all they come out just right

in the long run as a result of that dialectic. Certainly that is the best

I can hope for!

What is still not really very clear is how this will become a precedant
for many other forma of regulatory behavior that are bound to be imposed
on us as time goes on in response to various other kinds of public pressure ~-
perhape even just for relevance! Certainly it is already clear that bio~
hazard and safety is going to be the surrogate for a large number of other
evaluative considerations and while we have already had some of this in peer
review are according to scientific merit, I suspect we are going to see other
conditions of a tight budget and many other restraints on the growth of
science more and more critical determination by various people of what other
people are going to be doing in their scientific work. For that reason I an
very much preoccupied wthkh matters of process and I am not sure at all that
I am too happy about the way things went here, although it is probably
easier to understand them if one has access to all the input data. We certainly
seeing a far reaching erfeécization of sceintific activity that, as I have
already said, goes even beyond the existing pattern of peer review and that
will have many other intersections withouttside interests and we have been
sccustomed to see in the past. I am sure we are going to be seeing much more
of this in the future on a wide variety of other considerations although the
public safety is obviously the most obvious catchword on which to embark on
such a process,

I would indeed be grateful to you for your own comments or questions
or conceptual formulations and in particular hope you might call me up after
you had a chance to digest some of this, so we might pursue it a bit further.

I am conscious of the other obligations that I have been less able to
fulfill as a result of interventions of this kidd and will certainly do my
beat to meet then.

Sincerely yours,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics

JL/rr
Enclosures