September 10, 1973

Professor R.A. Brink
Laboratory of Genetics
Gadeersity of Wisconsin
Genetics Building
Madison, Wisconsin 53706

Dear Alex,

I cannot tell you vhat a warn feeling was evoked by your letter
of September 6th. It made me regret thet I was not closes to hand to be
able to embrace you. It made me think I really have never adequately
expressed the appreciation that I indeed felt for the way you had looked
after me. I was too innocent at the time to know the kinds of problens
that you must have faced in securing my appointment. My own later
experience has given me the perspective one needs to understand it but
I had never really placed your responsibilities vis-a-vis getting me
started in that perspective.

There were nany interesting things in the correspondence you were
able to send me, although only a few touched on my main motive in asking
you to dig it up. This motive was to get a further mérror on the attitudes
of biologists and of academic administrators concerning the new developments
im molecular genetics that vere juet breaking at that time. Inevitably this
is of course deeply intermingled with measures of personal reputation. I can

me to continue to have a deeply morbid curiosity about the more personel

aspects of how people felt about e brash young man who had just started his
academic career.

IT can have no quarrel with the restrictions attached to the letter that
you mentioned as being omitted from this set. I hope though that it will be
possible to tag that in the university archives, so that it may eventually
be part of a more complete record should anyone have the interest to follow
it up further sometime in the future. I have really been very discouraged to
find how much interesting and important material has been lost or destroyed.
By coincidence I hed just replied to a query, which I think was in no way
related to my own burrowing, from the Stanford library archives which nuskes
a comment in this direction.

There is one point in the correspondence that, to be quite eandid,
did startle me, though it is only by way of reminding me what I knew very
well and have learned to forget: the extent to which "race" was in anyone's
mind in justifying acadenic appointments. The references in these letters are
of course all by way of sincere efforts to overcome thet kind of prejudice,
but they are inevitably most eloquent in speaking to the atmosphere that
they were designed to penetrate. What I find almost amusing is that a set
of attributes that might well have been caused for legitimate criticien
were connected with my racial background rather than with my own personality.
Professor R.A. Brink -2- 9/10/73

Obviously we face the same kind of confusion between person and group today,
even though the arena has shifted to other ethnic areas: The correspondence
did do me a service by reminding me of the role of anti-Semitic feeling in
the development of various academic disciplines. This was something I could
hardly be totally oblivious about although I had been looking at it from a
rather different angle.

Alex, I really have been disappointed I have not succeeded in making a
more direct contribution to agriculture by way of applications of my work in
genetics. Of course, I do not have to lecture myself about the need to establish
the basic foundations in order for this to happen and there are already many
starts for which I can claim to have made some initial contribution. I do not
think this was entirely my own fault -- the agricultural research administration
certainly gave very little evidence of imaginative thinking in supporting
projects that might lead to an earlier application of molecular genetics to
agricultural problems. Of course, until we can get the biochemistry of seed
proteins down to the level where we understand the amino acid sequences and the
regulatory mechanismsatsteas fundamental a level as we have in our grasp for
their bacterial analogues,it is really difficult to make any rational
revolutionary steps. However, I think the time is ripe to expect this to be
coming about and I am looking forward to joining a conference at the National
Acadeny next spring which has the development of ideas along these lines as
one of its principal aime. Knowing what we do about genetic structure, it seems
to me almost ludicrous that we cannot promptly modify the amino acid composition
of major seed proteins so as to improve their nutritive value and without
prejudicing their crop characteristics. I hope I am not being unduly insensitive
to the practical problems of breeding plants in a way that emulates our test
tube experiments with bacteria: But Carlson's most recent work with protoplast
_fuaion in tobacco is just a harbinger of a multitude of new techniques that are

‘Sineerely yours ,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics

JL/rr