December 26, 1967

Mr. W. P. Henry
2b46 Huidekoper Place, ¥.W.
Washington, ,D. C. 2000T

Dear Mr. Henry:

I very much appreciated your thoughtful letter of November 25. I believe
I had in fact anticipated some of your questions in the current series of
articles, and I thought I might wait for these to run their course before
replying to you in person.

=
The principal source of statistical information on infant mortality that TV
I used was a report "International Comparison of Perinatal and Infant
Mortality", a publication of the National Center for Health Statistics,
Series 3, No. 6, March 1967. Dr. Helen Chase discusses the statistical
implications of different definitiom of live birth, and concludes that, for
example for Sweden, the discrepancy would amount to a shift of about 1 per
thousand of infant death to fetal death.

I agree that whehave to entertain the possibility of genetic factors in
infant viability. It is very hard to disentangle these from very obvious
discrepancies in environmental hygiene in a way that would meet ordinary
standards of scientific rigor. However, maternal disease and malnutrition
does play such an obvious role in prematurity that it may be splitting hairs
to talk about other components. We are certainly a long way from reaching
the irreducible minimum of infant mortality!

AMVAH

Of course, I am in profound agreement with you about the population explosion,
but this really does not relieve my distress about infant mortality, which is
avery hard thing for a mother to bear.

If I have seemed not to stress population control in my articles to a degree
commensurate with its importance, it is that I did not see I could contribute
very much more scientific insight into this problem than has already been
offered from many sources. But that will not deter me from bringing it up
again and a again whenever I have an opportunity.
Mr. W. P. Henry December 26, 1967
Page 2

My appeal to you is to express your own concerns about population control
to whomever you can influence in government, be it in the legislative or
the executive branch. And, also, to contribute to one of the responsible

organizations working in this field, like "Planned Parenthood" or the
Population Council!

Sincerely yours,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics