(Vy

September 16, 1958

Or. F. M. Burnet

Hall Institute of Medical Research
Royal Melbourne Hospital
Parkville, N.2. Australia

Dear Mac:

We hope you had a pleasant trip from Stockholm all the way back home. That
was a close call about those traveler’s checks and perhaps it's just as well you
didn't have time to be worrled about them!

I'm writing to send you the final version of a postscript to the Gatlinburg
Conference dealing with the revision or elaboration of the clonal selection hy-
pothesis for antibody formation. This has gone through a number of changes during
the last couple of weeks and has kept me quite busy at it. | tried again and a-
gain to generalize the ideas further but 1 would repeatedly come back to a very
slight extension of your own ideas and have therefore cast the final version
along these lines. I'm sure that you intended the main function of your publi-
cation of your hypothesis to be to stir up exactly such discussion as this. |
hope that none of the attributions or omissions thereof are out of line.

There is a small chance that we may be able to set up a few experiments to
test some of the predictions but | doubt that a serious program can be gotten

under way until we reach Stanford. To that end ! am looking forward very much
to the occasion of Gus's visit.

| would be most interested to have his reactions as well as yours to the
proposal in its present form, but I hope that your own principal reaction will
be that of fond recognition.

With ali best regards.

Sincerely,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Medical Genetics

JL/jp