UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

 

 

 

 

A Tribute to the Peapte of California

DONNER LABORATORY AND DONNER PAVILION BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 94720

July 8, 1968

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

Dear Joshua,

Many thanks for the columns, It's nice to see that
the general publie is wetting educated on things that really
matter! I had heard about the Xeroderma pigmentosun stuff,
and was especially pleased about it, since I had pulled it out
of the textbooks a couple of years ago, as a human disease that
might involve a genetic repair defect, and have been mentioning
it to my medical students to try to keep their interest in
bacterial repair studies a bit livelier, So it will be good
to be abke to show them some evidence indicating that this is
really so, ,

About caffeine, I hope you will not mind if I straidten
out @ slight inaccuracy about the sequence of events, The first
report describing enhancement of lethal and mutagniec effects of
caffeine was my 1958 paper (which may carry a 1959 date in its
published form) given at the X Congress of Genetics, Three
years later, at the 1961 Oak Ridge Symposium, I described similar
results for acriflavine and other basic dyes, and offered the
interpretation that caffeine, acriflavine and the other UV-enhancers
were interfering with an enzymatic dark repair process nornally
operating to remove UV damage from DNA, Later that year, Lieb
wrote a paper on caffeine, confirming my 1958 observation, and
Coming to the same conclusion -- that caffeine enhances UV effects
by blocking dark repair, Ce nest pas grande chose, but I thought
you would prefer to know that it wasn't quite right as you had it,
Better fire your researcher!

I hope you and Marguerite are settling into your new
house, We still plan to call you about having dinner in S.F, one
evening, probably quite soon,

Regards from Hy, too, to all of you,

Sincerely,

Lox

WATKIN