Saturday
10/4/58
Dear Josh;
Many thanks for your very nice letter, and for the reprint and the exciting diagrams of the new Stanford.  The map I did not need to visualize the area since I know it fairly well.  My father lived for several years in Los Altos, a community bordering Palo Alto, and extraordinarily lovely.
Your plans for your own department sound wonderful and very likely to fit in very well with whatever interests in genetics the clinical departments may develop.  With the sort of neoplastic or at least undifferentiated and rapidly growing interest in matters genetical now going on it seems to me essential that physicians and clinical investigators have the best possible guidance from people who know genetics as a vocation and not as a hobby.  Yours will be an obvious plan to provide such guidance and I'll
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bet that in no time people will be anxious to come to you with the idea of going back into clinical departments.  Do you plan to accept such people?
I have asked around a little about Bender who was doing tissue culture work at the University and heard only good things.  Someone said he has now gone to Oak Ridge.
As for people for medicine and surgery at Stanford, if I were picking a professor of medicine I would choose Gilbert Mudge who is prof. of Pharmacology here.  He is to my mind the perfect department head; an able investigator, knowledgeable and appreciative of basic science, and excellent in relations with people.  Perhaps he wouldn't leave -- being in pharmacology gives him time to do research -- but he's certainly the best here.  For surgery there is a very bright prospect named Henry Bahnson.  I suspect he's on everyone's list.  He's an excellent surgeon and capable in every other way, and interested in cardiac physiology as well as surgery.
We are at long last getting our "serineless" baby in the hospital next
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week and will have a chance to see whether or not he is in fact "serineless".
I'm still unaware of the identity of the pediatric appointment at Stanford.  Congress should take a lesson in the prevention of "leaks".
Best regards,
Yours very truly,
Barton