October 3, 1958

Dr. Ray D. Owen

Professor of Biology

California Institute of Technology
Pasadena, California

Dear Ray:
To yours of the 30th.

You might say the omission was hal fecalculated.( The postscript was written
under great pressure of time, mostly between Stockh ma and San Francisco and it
certainly could not be considered as a wel! thought out review of past and contamporary
thinking on the problem. And actually 1! did not have it consciously in mind at the
time. Before sending in the revise 1 did check to see whether your paper did ing
clude a detailed anticipation and, while some arguments run paralle! your main
conclusion seems to be precisely opposed. | must not have expressed this very
clearly because a couple of other people have brought up your suggestion (se you
can be sure it is not being generally ignored.) If 1 understand you correctly
you were proposing that antigens could induce (i.e. instruct) a change in or
near the DNA. 1! won't foreclose that possibility, but if the change is nucieic
(sequence) this is hard to see. So | suggested, as an alternative, that the
nucleic pattern changes spontaneously and an apt one then fixed (elected).

There are some more serious omissions in this discussion: especially Talmage,
Jerne and Schultz. But # was giving a personal critique expressing its own
evolution, i.e., from Burnet. | should patch this up by a more considered review
or there may be more serious misunderstandings. I'm giving a Mealler lecture at
Harvard next month, along these lines, and your letter provokes the thought that
| should amplify the P.S. This will give a chance to give better credit to
alternative formulation - [| don't mean for priority which neither of us cares
much about (and for my own part 1 lean very heavily on Burnet here) but to
clarify the distinctions.

One minor inhibition in communicating with you is the hypermutability of
your address. Are you still commuting to Oak Ridge, and if so do you have a
schedule.

1 sure hope we do see each other more often, but this is predicated on your
spending a reasonable part of your time at Pasadena after we move to Stanford.
Or do § have it all wrong?

Yours,

Joshua Lederberg