UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Address Reply to:

NAVAL BIOLOGICAL LABORATORY
NAVAL SUPPLY CENTER
OAKLAND 4, CALIFORNIA

PARTMENT OF BACTERIOLOGY

18 November 1950

Dear Joshua,
Cot both your letter and the reprints. ‘Thanks.
not

The reason for'naming the organism in the letter is the
stupid, short-sighted, ridiculous security regulations which state
that any letter containing the name must be classifieds Rather than
attempt to get into all sorts of administrative tangles, I prefer
to be "cryptic."

Fere's an interesting story on the TPTZ paper and your
question whether the technic works with other species. Unimown to
us, Huddleson's group at East Lansing had followed the same line of
researche Their results were "published" in the annual report (1950)
of the School ofVMedicine of liichigan State College to which report
I refer to you for the complete story. It (TPTZ) can be used with
a host of species and appears to be a valid criterion for differ-
entiating strains. But this part is the kicker: somebody and we do
not know if it was Huddleson sent us the report and noted that the
date of the report precéded the publication date on our note to J.B.
Ye think it coula’8ne of two things: either they feel we stole their
stuff because our procedure was absolutely the same or they are just
showing us how much more work they did to establish the same point.
At eny rate, we never heard of the reports neither ourmr the U lib-
rary contained a copy; and no one we mow seems to have seen the re-=
porte

le have been able to repeat the gigas work with "our
bug" and it seems satisfactorye I'll have ‘Jon give me the details
anc his cautions, etce and mail them myself. Otherwise, we'll run
into security againe

A stored culture going avirulent means to me thah the
selecting of colonies at random from a plate streaked with the culture
yields smooth solonies (clones) which will not kill.

How about some suggestions on this problem which has be-=
come very important to me? (We have tried acriflavine (a la Braun in
Brucella) and verious salts to detect dissociants with "our buge" It
has been a continuous CGisappointment in that the results are erratic
and non=-reproducible. The rough clones may or may not agelutinate with
acriflavine and salts under all conditions of concentrations, incuba-
tion temperatures, and duration of exposure to the agzlutinating azente
How about some agents which will agslumtinate non-smooth types?

Thanks again for everything. Vooarsly -