Memo on Initial Interest in Planetary Quarantine 1/2/76

I thought I had committed this to type long since but failing to
find that purported record, I thought I had better dictate a fresh note.

Sputnik was launched on October 4, 1957. At that time I was visiting
Melbourne on a Fulbright lectureship. As it happens, Sputnik was for some
time observable only from the southern hemisphere and we were lucky to
get an early look at it within a day or so of its launch. The excitement
that this event generated throughout the world is well documented in the
press and corresponds to my own vivid recollection. I had, I should stress,
long since been interested in speculations about planetary life in the light
of their relationship to the problem of the origin of terrestrial life. So,
I had been following the course of rocket technology with some moderate but
not intense interest up to that point. It seems obvious to me that this
launch would be followed very, very quickly by very rapid further technological
progress and I began to think immediately of the implications for planetary
traffic, the cautions of other observers notwithstanding.

In early November we left Australia on an itinerary that would take us
to visit Haldane in Calcutta for a round-the-world return to Madison, Wisconsin.

Fortunately, I have been able to find a letter to Haldane (which is only
tentatively dated February 1959) which helps to document my personal
recollection of that experience. I also have a fragment of another letter to
James F. Crow which corroborates that impression. These documents are attached.

The night of our arrival was the occasion of a lunar eclipse which was
regarded as an important religious festival in Calcutta. It was also the
occasion for a good deal of dinner table conversation (besides the Haldanes
Rana Mahalanobis, there were one or two other guests including a herpetologist,

I believe, called Patterson). Many members of the group were quite strongly
pro-Soviet in their inclinations and they were almost gleeful at the prospect
that the Soviet Union would follow up its October 4th triumph with another launch
perhaps even directed at the moon during the lunar eclipse. So, even stayed up

to see if there would be such a demonstration although we were well aware of

the physical difficulties of arranging for something that could be visible

from earth. That occasion led me to think very sharply about the extent to

which political motives would outweigh scientific ones in the further

development of the space program - which is of course precisely what has happened
to a very large measure.

As soon as I returned to Madison, I began to think what ought to be done
about the situation and I drafted a number of letters and memoranda, eventually
directing them to the National Academy of Sciences urging a more deliberate look
at the problem. These documents are also attached.

The consequences of these initiatives as are well documented now in the
official history were the establishment by NAS of an official position on the
question of quarantine, some encouragement to the formation of Cetex, and some
support for the establishment of one and then later two committees in the US
which came to be called Westex and Eastex because of their geographical locals.
(This was very much at my own initiative since I was as uninterested in frequent
transcontinental travel then as I am today).
Memo on Initial Interest in Planetary Quarantine -2- 1/2/76

These events preceded the official reconstruction of NASA from the NACA
which tended to give the NAS a remarkable degree of influence in establishing
preliminary policy.

Once these committees were established I did not feel there was a great
deal more that I needed or indeed would be able to do about the situation
but I did accept membership on a number of the related panels and in due
course felt that I had to respond to the challenges of planetary biology
in a more constructive way than merely to attempting to dampen exploration
in the name of contamination problem. So I have been a member of advisory
groups to NASA since that time including the Space Science Board; I have
also undertaken technological development programs in my own laboratory that
were intended to lay the groundwork for planet-based biological investigation
and to assist in offering wise critical counsel about national policies.

In that vein I have been a member of the Mariner and now of the Viking
experimenter teams.

In addition, the technological orientation of these efforts - which
was very different from my scientific work up to that time - led in a very
direct fashion to my interests in the uses of computers in scientific
methodology and eventually to my current interests and activities in artificial
intelligence.

Joshua Lederberg
Chairman and Professor
Department of Genetics