UNIVERSITY OF GOTEBORG
FACULTY OF MEDICINE
Department of Medical Biochemistry February 4th, 19714

Prof. J. Lederberg
Department of Genetics
School of Medicine

Stanford University
STANFORD, California 94 305
U.S.A.

Dear Professor Lederberg:
Thank you for the nice letter of January 21st, where you urge us to make
contact with Allen Duffield, stress the compatibility problem, and generously

offer a visit to your lab.

I spoke to Dr. Duffield yesterday via a telephone call, which he made from
Copenhagen. Unfortunately, his visit in Copenhagen ends today. so there
was no possibility for us to meet. Anyway, the telephone call made some

points clear:

We are in a preliminary phase, we want to evaluate the systems current for
computer interpretation of mass spectra. We are aware, that installing the
whole DENDRAL program, and the LISP compiler, will be time-consuming,
and the possibility of incompatibility will be very great. We have a PDP 15
computer with disk, tape and display facilities. Duffield mentioned that your
group usesan IBM 3060-67, which probably means that the program has to be

rewritten to a large extent.

ug
Duffield also mentioned that the DENDRAL group heavily engaged in work on
cyclic structures, and I understood, that further development of the structure

generator will await the solution of this problem.

Evidently, there are no specific conditions that we have to fulfill in order
to get a copy of the Dendral structure generator and the preliminary in-

ference maker, other than the general remarks in your letter. Neither are

 

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UNIVERSITY OF GOTEBORG page 2
FACULTY OF MEDICINE
Department of Medical Biochemistry

there any restrictions due to military secrecy.

We also talked about your intention to incorporate library spectra into
the Dendral scheme, and Duffield asked if you could get access to our
library. I could not decide this myself, but promised to mention it to
Prof. Sixten Abrahamsson, who is the boss for ‘masspectrometry-compu-
ter coupling here. He clarified, that the library is for sale through Wiley
and Sons, either in book or tape form. The copyright belongs to them, so

no ''reciprocal world trade" could be made at this point.

Through Dr. Schroll, Duffield promised to send the current versions of
the structure generator and the preliminary inference maker. This we
greatly appreciate, and we hope that the trade can be more reciprocal in
the future. If we make any developments pertinent to computer interpreta-

tion of mass spectra, we will let you know.

Prof. Abrahamsson will, I am told, visit Stanford in May this year. You

may then get more information.

I promised ~ Duffield to write to you again when we have gone through your

material, about our plans.

Yours sincerely

  

re,
oO as Blomberg

Re artment of Medical Biochemistry

versity of Gothenburg

Fack

S- 400 33 GOTEBORG 33

 

 

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