February 27, 1967

Mr. Judson Chrisney

Director, Long Range Institutional Planning
National Planning Association

1606 New Hampshire Avenue, N.W.

Washington, D. C. 20009

Dear Mr. Chrisney:

Thank you for your appreciation of my writings {n your home-town newspaper.
These are always welcome. Not as many people as you might expect take the
trouble to write such an expression. I could add that they might be even
more effective if addressed to the editor to help reassure him that he is not
taking so much of a gamble in running what some other newspaper men have
called an excessively academic kind of writing.

I guess I am not so utterly confident about the indominability of the indi~-
vidual ideal, especially when I see so many of my colleagues so utterly sure
of their own approach to the solution to human problems that they are very
willing to see them imposed without recourse.

I agree with you about the need to go to the early years to establish the
necessary motivation for development of taste. Part of my discouragement is
that I wonder whether age 2 or 3 might not be the critical period, which is
rather before the eduational system has an opportunity to lay hands on the
child. So I suppose my first insistent remark would be the need for more
careful research to find factual answers to some of these kinds of questions.
The way the Head Start program has had to turn itself inside out is a very

good example of what can happen when we try to promote serious action programs
on an insufficient scientific basis.

I am very glad to have the biennial report on the Association and will turn
to it at my earliest opportunity.

Yours sincerely,

Joshua /Lederberg
Professor of Genetics

Dictated but not signed by Dr. Lederberg

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