STANFORD UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

STANFORD MEDICAL CENTER
PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA 94304

DEPARTMENT OF GENETICS Area Code 415
321-1200

!
{pre Sept. 14, 1972

Dear Jime

While pulling material relating to the attached note I realized how
difficult it is to reconstruct past events when the documents rapidly
disappear. This is already happening to the history of bacterial gene-
tics, and leaves the door open to unsppported fantasies like Wyatt's.

Could you help pull together whatever material may still be extant
in Madison? I have in mind, for example, files that may relate to my
own recruitment in 1947 --certainly comments about me by outside referees,
and letters justifying a position in bacterial genetics would help document
the perceptions of contemporary geneticists about the then new findings in
a revealing way. If you can find any such material (perhaps by also consul-
ting Bob Irwin and RA Brink) I would of course be the most interested to
see copies myself (with any deletions you may feel necessary to protect
whatever confidences are still relweant 25 years later); but in any event
the main point is to be sure they are fireserved, and with some record of
their location.

If you have any documents or recollections of your own about geneticists’
perceptions of Avery in 1944-45, I would be most interested to have them too.
Columbia may have been too close to Rockefeller for my own experience to be
a fair sample. (By the time of the '46 symposium, of course, there can be
little doubt how far the word had spread.)

My own correspondence and other writings, since 1948 are in fairly good
shape, but earlier material is quite scarce.

Many thanks,

LT, J. P. KENNEDY, JR. LABORATORIES FOR MOLECULAR MEDICINE, DEDICATED TO RESEARCH IN MENTAL RETARDATION
MOLECULAR BIOLOGY ° , HEREDITY NEUROBIOLOGY DEVELOPMENTAL MEDICINE