2101 CONSTITUTION AVENUE CABLE ADDRESS: NARECO
WASHINGTON 25, D. c. WASHINGTON, D. Cc.

NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL

OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

SPACE SCIENCE BOARD
September 24, 1959

Dr. Joshua Lederberg
Department of Genetics
Stanford University
Stanford, California

Dear Dr. Lederberg:

I am writing in response to your letter of September 17. We have
already proposed to COSPAR a session along the lines that you have sug-
gested, embracing contamination problems and extraterrestrial life.
Independently, something of the same proposal was made to COSPAR by
Dr. Peter Alexander.

I would hope that you can plan at least tentatively to participate
personally in the symposium with one or two papers on these problems.
Meanwhile, I hope to receive some further information from Van de Hulst
as well as to pursue the matter in somewhat more detail in another
letter that will get off in a day or two. We should therefore soon be
in a better position, on the basis of Van de Hulst's plans, to develop
our contributions,

We have no information, other than the statement in The New York
Times asserting that some decontamination procedures were pursued, with
respect to the recent Soviet moon rocket sterilization, I am addressing
the Soviet Academy on this topic and perhaps we may have something
further one of these days,

Sincerely’ yours, et

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