April 22, 1955

Dr. T. C. Nelson
Institute of Microbiology
Rutgers University

New Brunswick, N.J.

Dear Tom:

Thank you for your letter and the two mss. copies, which I hasten to
acknowkedge because it may be a little while befdére I can dig into then,
You've caught me at an even more than usually busy time, with several
papers of my own to get out of thelr present mlf-finished state. But £
am very pleased to see that you have written up your kinetics work, and
the knowhadge that you are (orhought to be) impatient to get it out will
help speed up my examination of then.

Your letter hinted that you wanted me to be coauthor on this-—— surely
you didn't mean the present manuscript. I have only glanced at it for sub-
Ject matter, and miy have cause to change my mind myself, but unless you
have some urgent reasbn to differ, I think the authorship should be left as
it reads an the ms. now. I do think this work should be gotten out before
my own studies on the pairs, for which the kinetics did help lay the ground-
work, at least by suggesting the feasibility of a direct approach, and by
verifying the necessdty of wmkx working in complete mediua.

I hadn'S looked for it in the ms. but did you know of Hayes' glutamate
effect? I don't know the details, do you? But I suppose that glutamate is
one of the constituents of complete med&ym. I hope this paper will at least
point out td Hayes what the word rate means.

Lots of luck to you Tom-- I hope you don't press it too far in dickering
with Waksman about your appointment, tflough I agree you are fundamentally
quite right. If you can hang on while Braun consolidates himself (and it's
a cinch he will be the sussessor if he stays at all) the picture might change,
but you know the local politics a good deal better than I do.

Do you ever see Polly Bunting? Say hello to her for us if you do. Has
she abandoned science altogether? It would be a good deal for everyone if
she could dabble at the institute in her spare time,

Yours 3
j t
|

Joshua Lederberg