THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
BALTIMORE 18, MARYLAND

MERGENTHALER LABORATORY ; ; ;
FOR BIOLOGY Marine Biological Leboratory
. Woods Hole, Mass.
August 26, 1955

Dr. Joshua Lederberg

Department of Genetics

University of Wisconsin, College of Asriculture
Madison 6, Wis.

Dear Josh:

Rest assured that your letter of June 26 surgesting that it
would be a fine thing for the AIBS to undertake the prevaration of an adecuate
biological dictionary has not sone unheeded. I would have answered sooner
but for the slue of meetings I had to attend during June and July, and the
approaching meetings to get ready for.

I am in hearty sympathy with your idea, the more so since it
happens to be the very thing I proposed as highly necessary when I took
part in a symposium of the International Union of Biological Sciences at
Rome in April. Not only is it necessary, it seems to me, to define more
accurately the current meaninss of terms used in the biological sciences,
but it is also necessary to include the vast nurbers of symbols and par-
tially adopted but not standardized abbreviations that are often used without
explanation to the reader. Many biologists complain that they can't read
papers in cenetics intelligently because of our symbols and terms. I find
it equally bad, indeed worse, in biochemistry, where the invention of new
abbreviations seems to be at the rate of two or three per paper. ‘When a
single article uses DNP and DPN frequently in the same discussion, who is
unable to avoid becoming confused. I have seen biochemists following one
another at a symposium use the same 3-letter abbreviation for totally dif-
ferent compounds.

Of course, that is not. what you had in mind, but I think the
two objectives can be handled tosether. I will propose this to the Executive
Committee and to the Governing Joard of the ATBS, and if we can secure the
funds, we will start in right away. We need something of the kind to re-
place the lost part of,program which was preparation of the Handbook of
Biological Data, and which the NRC refused to give up when our separation
took place.

Best regards to Ssther and to you. I hope
to see you at Sast Lansing if you are there. JI enjoyed meeting your brother
recently at Cold Spring Harbor.