AUG 3 1964 4758 Edgeware Rd. San Diego, California 92116 July 31, 1964 Dr. Joshua Lederberg Professor of Genetics Stanford University School of Medicine Stanford Medical Center 300 Pasteur Drive Palo Alto, California Dear Dr. Lederberg: Thank you for your letter and the thoughts it conveys. Please excuse my delay in responding. The process of renting our house, packing and otherwise preparing for our year at Palo Alto has elevated my usually dis- orderly life to the chaotic level. I am delighted with your interest in my book and my work. I am par- ticularly delighted (and surprised) to find you are interested in such things as psychogenesis and the cerebral circulation. I will follow below the order of topics in your letter. My attack on psychogenesis is only the beginning. A major effort of mine while at the Center (Think Tank?) will be to systematically sift through the evidence on psychogenesis (as I started to do in my Chapter 3 of "Autism"), so I can legally throw the rascals out, if out is where they belong. (I mailed you a form indicating what I plan to do, thinking that you would be interested.) So you see if you had "troubled me with your ‘druthers',"” I would have been most interested. In fact, I still an, decidedly. ‘a7 (WINN On the cerebral circulation, I've come across data no less than astound- ing. (paragraph 2c of my memo to Tyler.) I will send you a paper on this as soon as I can complete it, which I hope will be in the next few weeks. Birth order--have sent you copies of the cards which came to hand most readily. I will be able to supplement this list considerably when I get to the Center and can sort out several very large stacks of cards that have been accumulating unsorted since I stopped work on the book. The list I sent is chronologically arranged. There are several so new that I haven't yet seen the articles. They may have extensive bibliographies. On this point--I tried to refer to articles with good bibliographies, so Infantile Autism would be a good source for researchers. Unless my memory fails me, the papers by Lasko, Schooler and Schoonover have good bibliographies on birth order and personality, schizophrenia, and intelligence, respectively. Birth order and labor: Guttmacher gives these values (N = 10,000): Mean Median Mode Primipara 13.04 10.59 7.0 Multipara 8.15 6.21 4.0 Page 2 Autism, parity, maternal age risk. Regrettably, nothing on this. I hope to generate interest, somehow, at Johns Hopkins so someone (Ph.D. candidate?) will get this information, as well as better follow-up infor- mation finto adulthood) from Kanner's records. On fertility impairment, nothing, but very interesting related data came from van Krevelen too late to squeeze into my book except through the back door: Van Krevelen found two cases of Aspergers syndrome in families in which an autistic child had already been diagnosed. I don't understand Asperger's syndrome very well, except that the kids tend to be quite bright (IQ over 130) but are decidedly deficient in warmth. Their intellectual pattern is peculiar, too. The two 1962 papers by van Krevelen I reference describe it. The implications of this are far from clear, but perhaps cytogenetic studies of these families would cast light on the matter. On cytogenetic studies, parent Berger called me from Atlanta to say his autistic daughter had been found to have 45 chromosomes, like the children in the enclosed reprint by Book, Gruenberg and Nichtern, but Bergers cytogenecist, unlike these authors, regards 45 as a very odd number. (However, he used blood rather skin samples.) Also on genetics, parents uncovered b the Autism book include 2 Ph.D. physicists, 2 Ph.D. psychologists and a corporation president (Berger, only a B.A.). There was also a Ph.D. in sociology who wrote me, but the diag- nostic questionnaire showed his child to have schizophrenia rather than autism, unlike those listed above. Of the siblings the book has uncovered, we have these IQs: 165, 163, 160+, 160+, 148, and “above 130." One of the psychologists is the Swedish woman who wrote "The Child in the Glass Ball." Back to the questions you raised: I am also worried about the lack of additional data linking autism to retrolental fibroplasia, but, as I had hoped, my book has uncovered some relevant data. I enclose a copy of a letter describing it. 2 Again, thank you for your kind letter, I shall certainly keep the interests you have expressed foremost in my mind when I come across relevant material, and I shall look forward to meeting you soon. Sincerely, ee 2 4h) [ 4\ Cee “Be Rimland, Ph.D. BR:bbn