THE ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY

1230 YORK AVENUE NEW YORK, NY 10021
September 22, 1988

 

JOSHUA LEDERBERG

PRESIDENT

Dr. Michael I. Sovern
President
Columbia University

in the City of New York
New York, New York 10027

Dear Mike:

I was going to talk to you about this over the phone but I
thought it would be more helpful if you had some chart in front
of you. Next to Mendel's garden in Brno there is: probably no
site more important in the history of genetics and therefore of
modern biology than the "fly room", the old "Room 613 Schermer-
horn" on the Columbia campus. Here from 1911 to 1928 T.H. Morgan
and a host of associates, everyone of them stellar, "invented
Drosophila" and the experimental genetics of the 20th century.
I gave a talk on that history at Woods Hole this summer and it
occurred to me to recall what had happened to that location.
(It was very familiar to me, although already in disuse, at the
time I was an undergraduate in 1941, and spending most of my
time in Schermerhorn Hall.

By an unusual stroke of fate that room still exists: it is
now numbered 920, despite the extensive. renovations that have
been made in that building and the removal of the zoology depart-
ment to Fairchild. In fact that area, 920 seems to be one of the
last pieces of real estate in Schermerhorn still controlled by
the biology department -- it is used as a prep room.

I was reconnoitering there the other day and can locate it
on the floor plan from the original construction of Schermerhorn
90 years ago: just that central north side of the building on
that floor has been left reasonably intact.

There would be a great deal of retrospective regret if there
were not some memorialization of that site: at least a plaque
and a showcase with some photographs of the principals and of
the central hero, namely Drosophila melanogaster. I hope you
Will be hearing from some other members of the biology depart-
ment about this; but I wanted you to know that I was the insti-
gator and prepared to help in any way in materializing that
  

Dr. Michael I. Sovern
September 22, 1988

-~-2-

project. If there is any question of the $1,000 or so that may
be needed for this huge effort I could, if you wish, bring the
matter to the Genetics Society of America. But before doing’ that
I thought that it ought to be Columbia's privilege to remember
its very own.

Of course there are hundreds of historic sites in every
field of learning strewn over the Columbia campus; but I do not
think it is following a bad precedent to try to remember them.
And certainly this one stands out above all others.

The fly room is referred to in half a dozen memoirs, which
I do not now burden you with. These only affirm what I have
been summarizing in this letter and they could of course happily
be elements in the commemorative display I suggest.

Yours sincerely,

 
  

ua Lederberg