STANFORD UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER

DEPARTMENT OF GENETICS

March 31, 1977

Dr. Harriet Zuckerman
Department of Sociology
Fayerweather

Columbia University
New York, N.Y. 10027

Dear Harriet,

Your letter of March 28 arrived just about simultaneously with Graubard's
copy-edited version of our manuscript; but I have really not had a chance to
look at that.

You did bring up some information about Norton Zinder that I hope I can
clarify. I do know that at the time the Nobel Prize was awarded to Beadle,
Tatum and myself in 1958 that the same press release that announced Tatum's
part in it also highlighted Norton Zinder's role in the work that taken together
was the justification for my own part of the award. This would suggest that a
number of people. believed and,:-in part, persuaded Norton that he might have
been justly entitled to some share in that particular recognition. Since, as
you well know, there’ is a limitation to three recipients in a given award, the
matter had to be settled quite arbitrarily in Stockholm; and needless to say
I had no part in it. As you well know, just where to draw the line is the most
difficult task and some sense of the arbitrariness of that particular discrimin-
ation must have contributed to my mood in the writing of my brief formal speech
at the celebration. I am quite confident that Norton has no overt feeling of
resentment to me about this nor do I believe that he has any substantial cause
for complaint at my own hands. There was no question, that he should be the
senior author of the principal paper announcing transduction that appeared in
the Journal of Bacteriology in 1952. But the circumstances of the award cannot
but help have aroused someambivalent feelings and I suspect that is what the
whole story is about.

Some years ago, I encouraged Norton to write down his own account of the
details of that discovery without asking that I or anyone else take a look at it,
and I hope that he may have that available to offer at least his own perspective.

What I don't understand is the way in which these considerations connect
with "certain sections of our paper." I first met Norton when he came to Wis-
consin as a graduate student, at Francis Ryan's recommendation, in July 1948.

I had already done some work with Salmonella and explicitly suggested to Norton
that he look into the extension of the search for recombination in Salmonella
along the lines that had just recently been worked out in E. coli. That led us
a merry chase, which I think is reasonably well documented in the published papers,
before we realized that we had a totally new phenomenon on our hands and the
virus was the actual vehicle transmission of genetic information. I played
devil's advocate for quite some time before being willing to accept that this
hypothesis had been clearly corroborated in preference to others that we were
also toying with. I doubt very much whether it would be possible to reconstruct
the day to day or week to week evolution of that concept although there is a
snapshot of the evolving doctrine in the 1951 Cold Spring Harbor Symposium:

there we talk about the phage eliciting the FA, the filtrable agent, and had

DEPARTMENT OF GENETICS, STANFORD UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE, STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 94305 » (415) 497-5052
not yet reached the conclusion that it was the phage particle itself.

But all of this postdates the framework of the discussion in our paper by
several years. So I am still in doubt what you had in mind about your concern
about the intersection of transduction with our story.

I will be starting to look at the Graubard revision in the next couple of
days and expect one or the other of use to initiate some further critical dialogue.

Bob Noyce has said no to us. I don't know where we are with Littlefield,
but I predict that Pierpont, who was moreor less firmly the backup candidate,
will be asked next.

Sincerely yours,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics

P.S. Trying to catch up with some backlogged mail, here are a couple of items:

On March 4, you sent me a questionaire which was obviously very carefully worked
out. But I had to say that some of the questions stimulated a blizzard of further
traffic and that introduces a certain chance element in just how the questions

will be answered. This is an old story, and you may well be probing how your
respondents interpret the question at the same time as you are analyzing their
reply. But you may want to know that they may have evoked images other than

some of those that you possibly had in mind yourself. For example under III.
Academic Standards, #13; 13a. and 13c. both refer to,‘the quality of a proposal"
with the implication that this can be judged in the abstract without to the
personality or the reputation of the author or the past work. Have you asked
yourself what you mean by the phrase? Is it the literary quality of the piece

of paper; the diligence and critical acuity with which past work has been

examined. Is it the clarity with which planned future experiments are described.

Or is it the expectation of a scientifically inportant outcome. Given that inherent
ambiguity, one might have posed the question whether grants should be awarded

on the criterion of expected outcome, all things considered, or the attributes

of the proposal as a document disregarding those expectations, or some mixture

of both. Obviously this is not the place to discuss the substance of the question, panne
but I think there is an issue as to how the question itself may be perceived.

Under question 16 and 17, there are also problematics about what constitutes
plagiary. I guess I have never heard of a case myself where actual scientific
results were stolen and published by someone else; perhaps Pace, the claims a 7
of people like Schatz. I guess it has not been unusual that some idea that I ih
had voiced is elaborated by someone else, who then may even have run a race to
achieve priority in publication. So the issue is whether the later type of event
is plagiary. The same consideration applies in #18 about the meaning of the
term "results."

Under question 46, the subdivision of the biological sciences is confusing
For a number of people there may be an almost random allocation within molecular
-3-

and cellular biology which of the five subcategories they would choose. Virology
and microbiology overlap -- one might better have asked whether one's principal
target organism was a virus, another prokayote, or a eukaryote. The questions

of biochemistry or genetics are orthogonal to the preferred research material,
and immunology is another wrinkle that cuts across that. So I suspect that the
fine structure there is going to end up not being terribly helpful for any other
analysis and may well be ignored. There was also another category called basic
health sciences that will add to the confusion.

Question 53 -— the explanation under 55 should be pointed to immediately
under 53 as defining the range of what is meant by consulting. Question 98 -—-
do you mean confidence that the manager will get ahead in the world, will do a
good technical job within the framework of his own institution, or will be re-
sponsible to broader social needs?

US €. p,
One-fifteen-f -- I would have turned the alternative around, in Pedocion
spirit.

Well, altogether it sounds like great fun.

Sincerely yours,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics