February 7, 1969

Profeasor R. A. Brink
Department of Genetics
University of Wisconsin
Madison, Wisconsin

Dear Alec:

There are two things that impel me to write you just now.

Your student, Dr. Katherine Lu Shih wrote to me about the possi-
bility of ea post doctoral fellowship or position and I would be very
much interested in having your appraisal of her before I go any further.

You may already have seen the enclosed piece on plant breeding.

I don't know which side of the fence you might be on, which may depend
mainly on how you happened to read it. (A sentence was edited out that

had to do with the need for additional federal funding in plant sciences.

This ig an occupational hazard of column writing, and is usually moti-
vated by pressure for space on the part of the newspaper. However, I
can't compalin that I have ever been very seriously distorted by it,
and they have usually taken pains to check with me when that might have
been an issue.) Anyhow, I do confess that I am somewhat chagrined at
the very slow pace with which new fundamental biology is accommodated
into plant breeding work, and it is really that good cause that I'm
trying to further.

It occurred to me that no one would be better sdtuated than your-
self to write a thoughtful comsentary on this confrontation and indeed,
to suggest specific avenues of development that ought to be encouraged
more rapidly than they are within the framework of the present system.

I thought even further about this in a current article reviewing
the present status of work in mammélian hybridization and somatic cell
genetics. It hag taken over ten years for thie to reach some serious
fruition, but it irritates me even more to realize that the necessary
antecedents to this line of genetic manipulation were already estab-
lished in plant chimaera studies, e.g. Winkler, in the 1930's and earl-
der. The whole issue was, of course, badly obfuscated by the Russians'
unsupportable claims for routine graft hybridization. But I still think
it was somewhat of a disgrace that this area has not been followed up.

 
I am absolutely confident that somatic cell fusion will play as impor-
tant a role in plant breeding sometime in the future as it is beginning
to play in mammalian genetics at the present time. (If you want a good
recent rundown on this, and had not already noticed it, you might see an
article from Green's group in Nature for December 21.) Let me know what
else I might be able to do to stimulate you to react to this issue.

It is not changing the subject at all to ask whether your work on
embryo culture of hybrids was ever taken up for practical breeding develop-
ment as vigorously as you think it might deserve.

Sincerely yours,

: \/
‘i Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetice

JL/ jn
Enclosure