SCHOOL OF MEDICINE
STANFORD UNIVERSITY. STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 94505

JOSHUA LEDERBERG June 6, 1978
JoseEPH D. GRANT PROFESSOR
oF GENETICS

Dr. David R. Calhoun
L Editorial Offices
——Encyclopedia Britannica
425 North Michigan Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60611

Dear Mr. Calhoun:

Thank you for your letter of May 8. My mailing address will
still be Stanford until September 1 but your letter addressed to me
in New York did reach me OK.

I have been giving some thought to possible subjects and would
like to suggest some of the following: 1. Carl Woese's work on
archebacteria: Purportedly a new kingdom of organisms. 2. Mycoplasms
which are indeed important primitive microorganisms. 3. The recent
breakthroughs in the cultivation of the malaria parasites in vitro
(Bill Trager's work at Rockefeller). 4. Mitochondria and their
functions in metabolism and in inheritance in tissue cells - you will
want to call on Dr. Douglas Wallace of this department for some very
interesting material on that question. 5. New perspectives on the
nutrition of children - even whether "milk is good for you". For this
you might want to chat with Dr. Norman Kretchmer, the director of the
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; or possibly,
Dr. Myron Winnick at Columbia Medical School? 6. The SETI project:

A new chapter in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and I am
sure that Carl Sagan, Frank Drake, or Phil Morrison would want to say
something about that. 7. The explosion of the personal micro-computer
- hobby and industry. 8. Asbestos as a public health hazard and policy
dilemma. 9. The question of consciousness in animals: I have in mind
Don Griffen's recent book and there was a series of articles in the
New Yorker a couple of months ago. 10. The solution of the four color
mapping theorem. 11. Perhaps something on communications, conceivably
along the lines of what I am enclosing with this letter.

 

The list of titles that you have mentioned for the current volume
is intriguing and strikes me as a very appropriate and interesting
balance and I again look forward to seeing the volume.

Yours sincerely,

JL/gel

P.S. 1979 will be widely celebrated as the centennial of Einstein's
birth and I am sure you will want to find some way to take account
Page 2
D. Calhoun
5-6-78

of that. Dicke at Princeton would be an excellent person to approach
about current theories of gravitation and you might want to approach

Dr. Brom Pais of Rockefeller University about personal reminisences,

although, of course, there will be many others.

If you hadn't already gone into it I think you should really take
a good look at the work that Julius Comroe has been doing in tracing
the history of scientific discoveries and their practical application
in medicine. He had a brief version of this in a paper in Science
magazine, 1976, Vol. 192, page 105, but he has gone far beyond this.
As far as I know Dr. Comroe has not written in a more popular medium
on these matters. However, I believe he would be quite interested in
doing so and it would be a coup for you to sign him up for the yearbook.

J. Lederberg