January 28, 1965

Dr. Kurt Benirschke
Department of Pathology
Dartmouth Medical School
Hanover, New Hampshire 03755

Dear Dr. Benirschke:

This is in reply to your letter of December 29 relating to joint interests
in advanced training in pathology and in genetics.

I am gure I will not surprise you by reacting in favor of any arrangements

that might help to improve communication between these fields. For such

programs to be a success it is important that fellows who have participated

in them never feel that they are out of the main stream of their specialty (on

in a way that might penalize them for appointments, promotions, etc. in a
their own departments. =
I do not believe there are any special financial problems, since genetics =>
is a field that has already been recognized as an urgent one for graduate v
training support, and we could, for example, accept qualified candidates wy
under the terms of our own graduate research training grant. However, I rm
would only ask that reasonable standards be established for appropriate
levels of compensation of fellows coming from other specialty fields, so =
that we can automatically apply them without question in arranging stipends. Tr \

One need only point to the exciting developments in fields like trisomy

at the boundary of genetics and pathology. I have the very unkappy reflec-
tion that discoveries of this sort might very well have been made two or
three decades earlier than they were if there had been better communication
among the related fields. I am enclosing a description of the general lines
of research and graduate training opportunities in the department. You may
wish to note that in addition to work in physiological genetics and in
population genetics, we are also deeply interested in questions of ultra-
structural chemistry, and indeed, many of the kinds of instrumentation which
we feel are vital for molecular genetics will be equally important for
molecular pathology, if one can make a fundamental distinction between them.

Sincerely yours,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics