September 23, 1976
SOAUY

Professor V danskit
Institute or theeiosl Paysites
Vorobjevskoje Shausse, 2-B
Moscow, B-334, USSR

Dear Professor Goldanskii,

You were very kind to send me your letter of Beptember 13th
and the accompanying reprints. I was of course acquainted with your
work published in Doklady on polycondensation under the influence of
shock waves. I had overlooked your comments on low temperature
chemical reactions and found them most interesting. I will look for the
review that you mention which is about to appear in Annual Reviews of
Physical Chemistry. (As I am on the Board of Annual Reviews, I will be
getting complimentary copies of the volumes and need not trouble you for
a reprint).

You asked me for some comments, which I will try to offer although
these studies are at the very boundary of my own grasp as a molecular

biologist.

First, I would agree that there is no longer any problem in principle
about the chemical mechanisms by which the specifie monomers and random
polymers similar to those in living systems may have been formed. As you
know, my main deviation from most of my contemporary colleagues working in
this field is that I continue to point to the primary cosmological
condensation as an additional factor besides the now popular model of
chemical condensations in the primordial planetary atmosphere. (See for
example Science, 127:1473-5, 1958). Further, the central problem at the
present time seems to me the difficult one of bridging the gap between
random condensations and those which have becbme template self-directed.

I discussed this issue beéefly in Science, 131:269-276, 1960. Although we
can today see some possibilities of simplified analogies to the eng mat ic .
template-directed polymerization of DNA, I think that our - s poe

relating this process to the coding of proteins is as much a dilemma as
ever.

Second, I wonder if you have thought of the significance of low
temperature tunnelling not just for the origin of life but for the general
problem of the primitive cosmological condensation. I find it extraordinary
that astronomers have tended to neglect the fact that condensed cosmic
matter belongs almost entirely within the domain of organic chemistry.

Yours cordially,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics