February 29, 1972 |

Dr. Robert A. Erasek Vt. bose
Genetic Laboratories, Inc, hs + - An Dk mes
Suite 609 Po :

Roseville Professional Center SO Sew ew fh

2233 North Hamline Avenue \
Roseville, Minnesota 55113 .

Dear Dr. Ersek,

Thank you for your letter of February 23xd and its interesting |
information about your enterprise in artificial insemination. It
does seem to me of the utmost importance to maintain the highest
standards of confidentiality, discretion, ethics, and good taste
if such an enterprise is to continue to be of positive service,
Some of the press accounts that I have seen of services like yours
give me some alarm in the possibility of misleading the public 1) with
respect to a cheap kind of perceived "immortality" and 2) unrealistic
expectations about the extent to which donor selection can indeed
fulfill expectations about the genotype of offspring. We are obviously
a long way from having proven sires in the sense that these are
available in life-stock. Provided the more obvious abuses can be
avoided - and I fear there will be great pressures from external
forces on all sides - it certainly does appear to me that more good
than evil might flow from the widening of parental options.

I do wonder if you have collected a bibliography on the relevant
scientific information on the safety of sperm storage with respect to
deleterious mutation. I am not much impressed by remarks that
‘millions of cattle and hud¢reds of healthy babies have been born"
through this procedure although that type of anecdotal evidence does
argue against catastrophic levels of hazard from AID. I think one
should sec&kto place an upper bound on the possible mutation rate
after storage by careful quantitative studies, for example, like the
use of counts of dominant lethals in the way this technique has been
applied to evaluate the mutagenic hazards of various chemical treatments,
I was puzzled by the recent blast from the APAA against sperm storgge
but I do not know the data or the imputed abuses on which that was based.

H.J. Muller would obviously have been very gratified to see this
level of rehlization of his dreams of "germinal choice" but, needless to
say, everything depends on the detail of its implementation!

:
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|
Dr. Robert A. Ersek ~2- 2/29/72

In your longer brochure at page 11, paragrpph 6, you properly
take pains to insist that the identity of the donor is never
revealed. I hope you really do have an effective coding and
security procedure to ensure that this can be relied upon. I trust
that it is only an oversight that the converse is also true namely
that a donor is given no information about whether semen that has
been placed in the bank is used for any particular impregnation;
I would even think it highly desirable that he be given no information
whatsoever, not even the statistics of the outcome.

I do not think I would be interested in any formal relationship
with your enterprise ~ at least not in the foreseeable future -
but I would be most interested in being kept informed about the
development of your services.

I would be alarmed if the proprietary rights mentioned on page
12 to new protective agents meant that your agents were in a category
of trade secrets. It would be very difficult for others in the
scientific community to make their own evaluation of the safety and
reliability of the medium if its composition could not be disclosed.

Sincerely yours,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics

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IL/rr