Memo from To: Dennis Flanagan
JOSHUA LEDERBERG Scientific American

MAY 3 1973

"on premature discovery"

I well understand why you might have some dif-
ficulty in deciding whether to print my
"letter". It might help if I suggest you think
of it more as an original article than as a
letter in rebuttal.

My motive for preferring S.A. as a vehicle

is theetest efficiency. Gunther Stent's piece
laid the groundwork that I do not have to re-
peat in as much detail as will be necessary if
I draft a similar piece for another journal.
And, while yours is not a "schotarly journal",
the general interests of your readers surely
resonate well with the issues that Stent and I
have raised. Finally, "not scholarly" is a
rather lame copout for wanting to move away
from a Pandora's box whose latent content was
surely visible to you when you accepted Stent's
article.

But I hope your main criterion will be whether,
in your judgment, I said something that would
be interesting to your readers.

May I make another request, regardless of your
decision? I am trying to collect more documen-
tary evidence on the history of molecular bio-~
logy, 1940-1946: if some of your many respon-
dents to Stent's piece offered such documen-
tation, could you put me in touch with them?

I have had a very interesting report from Carl-
son about Muller's jetters; but I suspect there
are many other sources from people whose letters

you did not print. Sincerely,

 

PROFESSOR JOSHUA LEDERBERG
Department of Genetics
School of Medicine

Stanford University
Stanford, California 94305