The Rockefeller Foundation

111 WEST 50th STREET, NEW YORK 20

MEDICAL AND NATURAL SCIENCES CABLE: ROCKFOUND, NEW YORK
TELEPHONE: COLUMBUS 5-8100

March 5, 1963

Dear Josh:

I am convinced that the pursuit of pure science is one of the
very few things that makes life worth living.

Where I show my age is in my growing fear that the applica~
tion of science from here on out is likely to bring us a good deal of
trouble. For example, I would have been glad if the development of the
airplane had stopped with the Stratocruiser, for now I find myself un-
able to get a good night's sleep flying across the Atlantic. I will
not take time to talk about how the increase in population has made it
increasingly difficult to find a nice place to have a pienic since
other people have done this rather more eloquently than I. The whole
business of spare parts leaves me somewhat disconcerted for rather
deeper reasons. As a medical man, I must of course participate in the
general belief that life is a good thing and ought to be preserved,
but like all good things, I think we can carry the concept too far, and
I think that our passion for avoiding death is now verging on the un-
seemly. After all, death and sexual dimorphism are probably the two
greatest biological inventions of all time. I don't think we should
go too far in tampering with either of them. In your preprint you
raise another probably equally important reason for concern about spare
parts = their effect on the concept of individuality. One is put in
mind of my grandmother's story about the boy who had a jackknife which
had been repaired so often that it had had seven new blades and three
new handles.

Finally, we come to the fact that it may just be too much
work to decide which way we want to direct our scientific power. Once
we can manipulate both the genotype and phenotype to suit our wishes,
we will have spent a lot of time deciding just what our wishes are,

For H.J. Muller to the contrary, there is no such thing as an ideal
man. We need all sorts of men to make a world. I boggle at the thought

 
"Dr. Lederberg -2- March 5, 1963

of designing each one individually. Most relevant here is your state~
ment of man's basic dilemma = the discrepancies between the size of
man's population and the complexities of his institutions on the one
hand and the individual feebleness measured as a data input rate of no
more than fifty bits per second. In one sense our problem is posed by
the very fact that science enables us to escape inevitability, for
when everything that happens becomes a matter of choice, the burden of
choice becomes unbearable.

All this is by way of saying that I found your preprints
stimulating and that you were right in suspecting that some of the
thoughts were not entirely unfamiliar to me. Incidentally, I thought
the extended version was ever so much better than the summary for
NATURE. The effort of compression had squeezed out too much of the
juice. Finally, I am not absolutely sure, in fact I am not sure at
all, that one should seek an isolated or special environment in which
to think about such matters. There is something stimulating about
continually being brought in contact with new ideas and with urgent
practical problems which we probably couldn't do without for longer
than a few months. There are some exceptions to this rule - Newton
may have been one of them, and you may be another - but very few
minds are really self-regenerating.

One of the oddities in the present situation is that the
historical custodians of value problems feel so completely unable to
cope with the new angles being revealed by science. Philosophy seems
to have died at just the moment when it is needed the most. It looks
as if the future is really up to us naturalists, and I hope you can
keep me informed as your thinking progresses. I am including a couple
of reprints and other oddities which may bear on some of the points.
The three chapters are part of a book I have just finished which is
supposed to tell teenagers in search of a career something about sci-
ence. The treatment of value problems has therefore been kept at a
somewhat primitive level, but since the problems are likely to be
with us for a long time, I thought it might be wise to get the younger
generation thinking about them early.

Yours sincerely,

Robert S. Morison, M.D.
Director

Dr. Joshua Lederberg P.9. pent]
Professor of Genetics f*

Stanford University School of Medicine

Stanford Medical Center ers A

300 Pasteur Drive Ourcylen (97 G wn 19EL

Palo Alto, California

RSM:sts

Enclosures myo.