July 15, 1959

Dr. George Lefevre
National Science Foundation
Washington 25, 0.C.

Dear George--

| heard only recently that you will be leaving NSF for Harvard. Best wishes
to you -- | know you will be missed at NSF, and that geneticists throughout the
country will also regret losing your help at the foundation. | Suppose you must
be concerned about finding a replacement, and | scratched my own head over this
(gratuitously) for a few moments. | wonder If you'd thought of Dave Perkins as
a possibility. We'd be very sorry indeed to lose him from Stanford, but it can
hardly be less important to find the best men for the job in Washington. | have
no idea whether Dave would be interested (1 suspect he's underpaid in his job
in the Biology Department) tut | do think he'd suit, on the basfts of general tem-
perament no less than his good grasp of the whole fleld of genetics.

This isn't the main thing | wanted to ask of you however, which is if youcould
gét for me a copy of the Killian subcommittee report on National Information Ser-
vices which decided a central bureau was not needed. (1 can't agree with that con-
clusion myself-- |! think it is one of our mostk urgent needs in science). This
is quoted by James Rand in testimony before the Humphrey Subcommittee for a Dept.
of Science (Committee on Govt, Operations, 86th Sen., Subcom. on reorganization;
May 28, 1959 Part It, p. 140.)

While i'm asking you about Information, § hope you and Bi11 Consalazio and Lou
Levin and all have taken a hard look at Eugene Garfield's scheme for Citation Inddxing
@s a way out of the abstracting Impasse in science. {| am completely sold on the idea,
and would be even If it were just used as an adjunct to effective subject-indexing.
Dwight Gray has the details. {! hope Garfield can be more effectively encouraged
rather than deflected, as he may feel he has been in the past. This may mean trying
to help him work out a better concrete proposal-- the objections to doing this for
research projects surely don't apply to this kind of service. Most or all of my col-
leagues who've sat still long enough to assimilate a proper explanation of this ap-
proach have been quite enthusiastic for its utility.

As ever,

Joshua Lederberg