June 9, 1975

O. Meredith Wilson
Director, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences

Joshua Lederberg
Department of Genetics

Dear Med,

Thank you for sending me the Annual Reports and the minutes of
recent meetings of the board. This material should be quite sufficient
and I doubt that I have any profdund need to go back into earlier history
except for academic, as opposed to directorial motives.

I was particularly interested, as you know, in getting some grasp
of the current financial status of the Center and had no difficulty in
finding the basic information that I thought I should have from the material
you sent me.

The recent minutes did not howewer include any detail on the Center's
investment management nor, for example, its current portfolio, I have no
sense of urgency about this but I hope I will have enough opportunity to
be informed in some detail how these mafhers are managed at the next board meeting.
The balance sheet for March 31, page 7, indicated a figure for securities
under assets but did not specify how these were valued, The printed report
form for fiscal 1974 did give both valuation at cost and current market
both of which are helpful to know.

I did a quick calculation on the relationship between the most obvious
direct costa of the Center, the stipends and support for fellows, to the
supporting activities and found that a figure of about 62% might be a fair
representation of the overhead as percentage of direct salaries. This is a
perfectly reasonable figure by comparison, for example, with university
activities and in fact is not a completely fair one since a considerable
part of the dollars expended in the name of supporting activity probably
deserve to be credited to direct scholarly output. I think it may be useful
to have such calculations available in response to any questions that might
be offered with respect to the efficiency of the Center's operations,

I noted that the fixed asset account included the cost of buildings
but I could not tell what allowance if any was being made for depreciation;
nor did I see any fiscal reference to the value of the lease-hold on the land.
Again, these are not matters on which I need early answers but I hope that
I might have an opportunity to get a clearer picture about them in connection
with further meetings of the board.

over
O. Meredith Wilson -2- 6/9/75

To turn to non-fiscal matters, I did note the emphasis that you
continue to give to affirmative action issues in connection with the
recruitment of fellows. Since there is a lot of activity in this line
at Stanford, there may well be an easy opportunity for mutual cooperation
and I will see what I can find out from the university side in the near
future. Menawhile, I did have a few passing thoughts about some black scholars
that may or may not already have come to your attention. In suggesting their
names I certainly do not insist upon their credibility as candidates but
simply as subjects for further consideration.

Perhaps one person I have no reservations about is Jim Gibbs who has
announced that he will retire as Dean of Undergraduate Studies at Stanford
in order to return to his work as a Profeasor of Anthropology. It is just
possible that a year at the Center as an interim activity before returning
to his department might be a very good think for him, and I hope his name
has been in your files.

Two people you may not have heard about at all are Jean Cook who was
a classmate of mine at Columbia College and then at Medical School and is
now a Professor of Medicine at Albert Einstein Medical College in New York.
He is a very bright person. I would have to say not renowned as a distinguished
scholar, probably for having dabbled intooo wide a variety of fields and
in part perhaps for having been brought in a number of political and social
controverstes that abound in the neighborhood of Einstein; however, as you
are also looking for someone in medicine for the next couple of years, I
thought I should at least present his name to you, Another man is Richard
Goldsby who is a first-rate cell biologist, recently at Yale but who moved
I think to North Carolina. Besides excellent laboratory work in developmental
molecular biology he has also put out a very sane book on the biology of race,
and I find him altogether a bright, charming, and productive person. I know
that he has continuing concern about the positive and negative aspects of
eugenic movements, and while he is not of the renown of a Cavalli-Sforza or
a Jim Neel, I think he might do very reasonably as a resident biologist
(without particular regard to the emphases of the POSTS Program). If you have
other good contacts at Yale, I am sure they would be able to dig out more about
hin.

I suspect that names like Kenneth Clark, Tom Sowell and Brimmer hardly
need be brought to your attention.

I think that a California institution should be paying special attention
to Chicano scholarship, and I will be making some inquiry along those lines.

We still have a somewhat comparable problem in identifying a requisite
number of women, and I would again bring up the name of Marjorie Shaw. I am
sure that Gardner would have no défficulty in getting further soundings about
her if these are not already available since she is well known among the
biologists at Austin. However, her own situs right now is at the M.D. Anderson
Hospital, Texas Medical Center, Houston. I think you may remember I brought
up her name before but at a time when she herself might not have been available.
She is an extremely competent - one hasitates to say brilliant - human cyto-
geneticist and has also distinguished herself recently by undertaking and
completing a degree in law in order to prepare herself better to bkean expert
0. Meredith Wilson -~3- 6/9/78

in some of the problems that indeed are emerging on the law of gnaetic
intervention. She would be a very credible if not my first choice if we
were paying no attention to sex balance. That she would be a strong asset
for a role similar to what I mentioned for Goldsby, I have no doubt.

Do not fear, I still have in mind a number of the other points that
were raised in our own diacussion, and I hope to have more for you about
them in due course,

Sincerely yours,