THE ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY
1230 YORK AVENUE NEW YORK, NY 10021

January 5, 1987

 

JOSHUA LEDERBERG

PRESIDENT

Dr. Bryce Crawford

Office of the Home Secretary
National Academy of Sciences
2101 Constitution Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20418

Dear Bryce:

Here, at last, is the manuscript of the memoir on Ed Tatum
that I had promised you and your predecessors some while ago.
I had gotten a good start at this before I moved to The Rocke-
feller University eight years ago. I hope you will sympathize
that I have had to scramble to find the time to finish it up
properly. Perhaps it is just as well, as a number of challeng-
ing historical questions have come up in the interval. The
emphasis given in various parts of this memoir is directed at
rectifying a record that has been at risk of distortion, mainly
from faulty memory and careless attributions. A fair amount of
historical research has gone into this, as I am sure you will
recognize.

I have tried to keep additional references to a minimum,
in keeping with the traditional format of the memoirs. I do
however have a number of "footnotes" that are marked in the
text in braces. It would be fine with me if they just stayed
in the text as such, although they could very appropriately be
brought out as separate footnotes in small type at the end of
the article.

For the technical handling of the manuscripts it would prob-
ably be some convenience to your staff to have the text in your
own word processors. I can very conveniently electronic-mail
the material. In fact there are two NAS mailboxes on the
Rockefeller computer at the present time, in the hands of Victor
Rabinowitch and Mitchel Wallerstein respectively. There should
be no problem in their translocating the material further into
the word processors in your own office. If you have even more
direct access to the Arpanet I can wire the ms. just that way.
Dr. Bryce Crawford
January 5, 1987

-2-

Please let me know if there is anything else I can do to
expedite this manuscript through the press. Besides a fitting
memorial to Ed Tatum, it is a bit of definitive history that
will be welcomed by a number of my colleagues, with whom I have
been in correspondence for some time. Barton Childs and Aleck
Bearn and I have reached some consensus about the comment on
Garrod, which has been somewhat fuzzy in the prior written
histories of molecular biology.

Yours sincerely,

J a Lederberg