bes ,
cae MR, . Woods Hole, Mass,

| a 12 September 1957
Near Josh and Esther, “s Ce

“mo keep the bonds af Commonwealth from. weakening, T
thought T'd drop you a line this evening, while. Joyce fiddles
with the short-wave set. The world seems 4 small and homely
place: Tendon, Hilversum, Moscow, Brussels, throng at our

. ‘threshold for @ hearing. pS oe

; Ritty, whose maiden name J, forget and whose: married name
_. you got wrong (unless. she,upped and. married somebody vou didn't
"expect her to), and. Bruce, or Ben, or whoever he-was, tuted
up, ‘and wete given the Grand Tour. The Syesmans: had already
left, so they didn't have a chance to meet then® We look .
forward to Maurice and Raquel “#ekurnitig-next"¥War. ~ Fust row.
the lab. is pretty empty, reminding one of that poem by de la
Mare - "The traveller*, J]. think itts called. ‘¥he Gaffrons
are here for a short visit, on their way back from Naples,
and we may be able to persuage them to cone over fer coffee
tomorrow evening. we wer@.at “Oro di Wapoli« Last night, a
film I can heartily recomm@Hd, concerned with fourunconsected
episodes in the life of a great city. we even. had neiehhours
who kindly provided the olfactory atmosphere ofthe place.

Well, stm told it's antibtetic, anyway.

 

      

 

A couple of paners whieh interested me todsy were in the
P.N.A.S. ("which country?y the Canadian editor pencilled
against a reference T!d mad te Dick Starrts work on spore
germination) and the Annalg#'de 1'institut Pasteur, bzw.

The former was by a chap wae’d found phage shockate from

EB. coli to be capable of multiplying not only on protoplasts
of BE. coli but also on those of A. aerogenes, etc., though T
don 't think he said whe ther: the final crop had any changed
host-range. The other mary Bad followed through cell lineages
of ». coli zygotes, and pi¢ked up all sorts of hybrid geno-
types during the first few divisions. I'm not quite clear
why these weren't detected gfrlier. a :

The mystery of cell-dgya sion in diatoms beeores more
profound when one consi der#’ those genera in whitchione valve
has a raphe - a groove in the Silica, through which it can
secrete mucilage and slip al@ng thereby - and the-other hasn't.
so at each cell-division (sorry, T mean cell division) the
have-not produces a have valve, and the have produces a have-not.

 

 
 

  

Thanks very much for your account of Yeron Island; it
sounds fascinating. If thabre wi gon is permally,.
it has already fascinated ws, sine " Owed some really
wonderful coloured slides of its fauna when he visited the
Fish & Wildflower Lab. here a few weeks.ago, and (b) gave.us
some most’ entertaining information on the Barrier Reef animals,
not only at that lecture, but also wien we met him again at
“tanford, and on. the.trip.to..Pacifie: Grove at, the end ef the
A,1,B,S, meetings. . He. seems,to be-a.most stimulating verson;
with a very wide coverage of interests, and an: excellent. sense:

    

of dry humour. ee ee
Jeosuggests that the reason’ coral coasts’ seen to have so

)\: fewralgae is that, after all, corals are 90% alga anyway, on _
ca proteinsy basis (or'so the odums have asserted). . Water.
passing over s reef bétomes oxyzenated during the daylight
hours... Perhaps. competition.for. CO,.is. so intense ‘that only
the little endozoic,%0oxanthellae ean get enough to live ‘on.

io
2

Shets finished the msnuscript on Phaeodactylum, and provoses
to form a new suborder for it, the Monocraticulinense. The
describing of new subclasses is a rare event these days. ‘his
afternoon I turned up my first paralyzed Platymonas mutant
(a msrine cousin of Chlamydomonas), so I'm feeling pretty
pleased with myself, toc. -

_We had two meetings here last week, the Timmologists and
Oceanographers, mid the General Physiologists,‘ and: by wearing the
same badge I leaped nimbly from one to the other without paying
a second $2 fee. ‘A session on regulative mechanisms in micro-
organisms was most amazing; I had no idea that mass and. magasanik

et ond al. had bacteria so trained that they could’ turn on and off
' complicated synthetic and degrading - degradative? - pathways

evidently have souls after all -. the bacteria, .

; . ES

at will. they
T mean. oe ce Do
Talking of... well, following free association ... we
heard a most interesting debate on the B.B.C.‘last night about
prostitution, which is technieally not a legal offense in _
Britain, but which they hope to drive off the streets and, so
te speak, into the. telephone system {at least for the. more
determined customers). Tt made me realise all the more foreefully
what a'Puritanieal. lend [ live in now; .F've not: heard: such free
speech on the wireless for yeats. and years. Se
T hope ‘that those huge distances and 911’the lecturing are

not precluding you from having 4 wonderful time, | -

. With warmest vernal ereetings.
Paty