STANFORD UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER

DEPARTMENT OF GENETICS

August 30, 1977

Dr. Edward C. Ezell
BE-4 History Office
Johnson Space Center
NASA

Houston, TX 77058

Dear Dr. Ezell:

Since I spoke to you last week I have now had a chance to look over the
draft of the first two chapters of your manuscript on Mars exploration.

You have the advantage of perspectives of - high levels of decision

making that give you such an advantage with respect to breadth of view,
that I really do not have a great deal to add to the detail of your account.
Certainly it gave me a great deal of information that I did not have before,
particularly about the policy background of the choices between lunar
versus planetary and manned versus unmanned missions. So I only have a

few comments of a rather general nature.

Your discussion is rather thin about the maneuvering that preceded the
establishment of NASA and the allocation of tasks to the civilian versus
military competitors for a role in space. Perhaps this is not the place
for such discussion but I thought the issue deserved more explicit mention.
My own efforts to seek a policy about planetary quarantine were begun
against that background of uncertainty as to who would have responsibility
for U.S. efforts in space.

Similarly I might have suggested that you highlight a bit more strongly

the shift,from pre-1958 images of the exploration of the planets by manned
flights as against the subsequent emphasis on the development of instru-
mentation that could telemeter significant data on issues like the presence
of life on Mars. This shift was very much connected with concerns about
quarantine - which would have been impossible for a manned mission. So,
paradoxically, the development of this caution about the means of planetary
exploration undoubtedly accelerated the pace at which it was eventually
initiated!

As to the scientific background of exobiology: Chapter 1, page 37, I would

also draw attention to the very important development of “comparative
biochemistry" between about 1936 and 1956. The book by Kluyver and VanNiel

The Microbe's Contribution to Biology, 1956 is a seminal overview of this
doctrine, which reached its culmination with the work by Beadle and Tatum (194)
on the biochemical genetics of neurospora. Norm Horowitz was one of

Beadle's proteges. Of particular relevance is Horowitz's paper, 1945,

DEPARTMENT OF GENETICS, STANFORD UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE, STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 94305 * (415) 497-5052

oe EA
Page 2 8/30-77
Ezell

“On the Evolution of Biochemical Syntheses" which appeared in PNAS 31:153;
it was reprinted in "Extraterrestrial Life: An Anthology and Bibliography"
as an appendix to the 1965 NAS MARS summer study. This global perspective
on the underlying unity of life on earth was an essential precondition

for an informed inquiry about patterns of life elsewhere.

As we discussed in our conversation, a good deal of effort ~- and this was
the major responsibility of the space science board - had to be exerted

in response to substantial criticism of investment in planetary exploration
on the part of a wide variety of other scientists. This is one of those
points that everybody knows but it did not come through very explicitly

in your draft.

At page 73-74, you discuss the microscope and multivator experiments. The
decision making about the role of these instruments was more complicated
than your account gives out. The microscope was by no means a "complex
heavy instrument", especially if viewed as an optional attachment to an
existing camera system. It did have the problem of requiring a costly
data channel for getting the information back to earth. In addition, as
I mentioned in our interview, there were difficulties in interpreting
objects selected at random that made this a less preferred choice in the
absence of other methods of getting selective information or selective
concentration of the sample. We did some quite promising work on the
latter approach using flotation.

The problem with multivator was the heat-lability of the substrates we
were working on. Apart-from that the concept isn't all that different
from the other metabolic measurements. Your writing is somewhat ambiguous
about the extent to which these experiments were in direct competition
with one another. I was never a particular protagonist for any of our own
experiments and quite cheerfully joined in an overall look at an optimized
system. Many of these ideas arose from collective discussions over a
substantial period of time and it would be difficult if not impossible

to trace the details of authorship.

If you have the letter mentioned in your letter 51, chapter 2, Urey to
Newell, 29 March 1961, I would be curious to see the detailed wording.

Yours truly,

Joshua Lederberg,
Professor of Genetics

JL/ gel