INDIANA UNIVERSITY
College of Arts and Sciences

BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA

DEPARTMENT OF CHEMISTRY BOXES

July 22, 1959

Dr. Joshua Lederberg

Department of Genetics

Stanford University Medical School
Stanford, California

Dear Joshua:

Thank you for your prompt answer to my letter of July 10th. I was glad
to learn that Dr. Nossal will be in this country. Following your suggestion
I sent him an invitation to be one of the speakers on the planned symposiun.
Other invitations were sent to Lennox and Coons. I would be very glad if you
would take over the role of the introductory speaker. Your paper in Science
should make this role very easy to you. Since those principally interested
in these problems will be the geneticists and since you are one of the few
persons who worked in both fields, genetics and immunology, you are particularly
well suited to familiarize the audience with the problems, solved and unsolved.
Please let me Imow as scon as possible whether you will do us the favor of
introducing this symposium by a talk of about 20-25 minutes.

You are asking in your letter of July 13, what my thoughts on selective
antibody formation are. I like it better than Burnet's original idea of
adaptive formation of antibody producing enzymes. However, I still believe
that the evidence for the simple template mechanism is better. The crucial
guestion is: "Is the continyous presence of antigen necessary for antibody
formation?" Burnet says that it is unimaginable. I can only say that some
antigens (polysaccharides) persist for years as shown by Felton, that we find
injected labeled antigen as long as nine months after injection, that the
radioactivity we find is protein-bound and is not in the form of amino acids,
hence must be in the form of a derivative of the original label (S-35sulfanilic
acid or C-}4-anthranilic acid). It is difficult for me to believe that the
organism should have preformed antibodies to all the strange artifacts of
chemical laboratories against which you can form antibodies. All this is
easier understood if you assume that these chemicals or other fragments of the
antigen are bound to the template of the #-globulins, whatever the nature of
this template may be. Burnet's views are to a high extent based on the difference
between primary and secondafy response and on the belief that the organism
shortly before the secondary response is free of antibody. We have disproved
this assumption, as I will report at the meeting. We find with sensitive
methods continual antibody formation even after a single intravenous injection
of serum albumin or ovalbumin.

If, as I hope, you accept our invitation to introduce the symposium by
discussing the current views, please send me before August 10 a short abstract,
not exceeding 250 words. If the speakers want the full text published in the
Dr. Joshua Lederberg 2 July 22, 1959

Proceedings of the National Academy, the local committee will propose it. I
personally believe that short abstracts are preferable in this case since so
many symposia on immunology have been published recently, and since you and
Talmage have discussed the pertinent problems in Science which is easily
accessible to everybody. However, I would appreciate to have your opinion on
this matter. Hoping to hear soon from you either by mail or phone (Office:

EDison 6-6811, ext. 281; home EDison 2-1588) I am, with by-west regards, also
to Mrs. Lederberg,

 
   

sincerely