GENETICS LABORATORY MAY 8 i97e

DEPARTMENT OF BIOCHEMISTRY

W. F. BODMER UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
PROFESSOR OF GENETICS SOUTH PARKS ROAD
TELEPHONE 52260 59214/5 OXFORD

TELEX 83681 2nd May, 1972. OX1 3QU

Professor Joshua Lederberg,
Department of Genetics,

Stanford University Medical Center,
Stanford,

California 94305,

U.S.A

Dear Josh,

I should like to accept your invitation to attend
the meeting which you are organising at the Weizmann
Institute from July lst to July 4th. I think I mentioned
to you that I had thought I might be going to a Meeting in
Hawaii at that time,but for a variety of reasons it turns
out to be difficult and inappropriate for us to go to
that. I assume there would be no difficulty in providing
accommodation for Julia at the Weizmann if she comes with
me. I will, in fact, be very interested in such a discussion
aS apart from my general interest in this area it relates
specifically to the work we are doing on the British Association
working party on some of the social issues connected with
advances in genetics’ and biology, of which I am Chairman.

I shall look forward to hearing from you in due course
concerning the further details of the meeting.

I was very interested to get your various comments on
the history of ideas in cell fusion and its use for somatic
cell genetics and also on the mitochondrial work by Lettre.
We are, in fact, going to try and do experiments along these
lines. There is one possibly promising selective technique
which may be useful in this respect. It appears that 5BUdR
may be preferentially incorporated into mitochondrial DNA
in the 5BUdR resistant cell lines. When treated with light
in the appropriate way the mitochondria of these cell lines
may therefore be inactivated so providing a simple selectéé
mechanism for insertion of normal mitochondria. Incidentally
on a minor point on the work that we did on the mitochondrial
DNA, it was really David Clayton that did all the density
gradients and analyses of the mitochondrial DNA in the hybrids,
not Teplitz. Ong@ the point you ask about techniques fa
looking at the protein constituen 66 of the mitochondria,
I think it is now fairly clear ‘that we should be able to
distinguish at least some of the mitochondrial associated
enzymes if we use an interspecies mixture. Thus at least
with respect to detecting the presence of whole mitochondria
from one or the other species, this should not be a difficult
problem. More difficult is the question of trying to detect
those protein components of the mitochondria which may be
coded for by the mitochondrial DNA. Once again here we are
hoping that immunological techniques coupled with the use of
-2-
appropriate metabolic inhibitors may help us to identify
differences with respect to those proteins which are
specified by the mitochondrial DNA.

With best wishes.

Yours sincerely,

yr
UA pASY
r.

Walter Bodme