THE ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY

1230 YORK AVENUE NEW YORK, NY 10021-6399

JOSHUA LEDERBERG cd

PRESIDENT

 

October 19, 1984

Dear Joan

We are all very grateful to you for an artful presentation
of magnificent material at the Harvey lecture last night. Having
that series in my backyard is one of the great compensations of
living in New York.

Your remark about medical application assisting basic research
touches an issue I have been thinking about for some time. [In fact,
(stated necessarily simplistically), one can argue that:

a) Only now - in a "3d cycle" - are we again entering an era where
basic science really contributes that much to medicine, and (
b) As much as ever, “medicine” - and I generalize that to natural \y

history and other confrontations with praxis and the real world -
will probably remain the seat of the most revolutionary discoveries.

The reason for the latter, I think, (going back to Plato) is that
we are still stumbling about in a dark cave, and our models of reality
are so simplified. We have to sharply reduce the number of
intervening variables in order to do experimental science. Nature
is not so constrained, so when we go out there and look at disease,
or speciation, or try to build a bridge, we discover a lot of new
phenomena that we just would never have built constructively in the
lab. Where would basic immunology be today if not for the phenomenon
of the myeloma? In re your auto-antibodies, people were unhappily
subjected to self-inoculation with i) an unwonted range of antigens,
and ii) untempered by auto-tolerance, such as you would never have
invoked experimentally, but can exploit after the fact.

I don't recall just what I may have in print on b); I have been
writing about a). After I finish this letter, I'll look and see.
You will in any case be interested in a book that Henry Beecher
edited: "Disease and the Advancement of Basic Science", Harvard
Press, 1960.

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