August 22, 1969

Mr. Paul N. McCloskey
141 Borel Avenue
San Mateo, California 94402

Dear Mr. McCloskey,

Thank you for your note of August 6th. I would be very happy to
organize another meeting of the Stanford Advisory group at the usual
place, Treasidder Union, at 8:30 AM Friday October 10th. If there are
any things particularly on your mind, please do let me know and
conversely I will try to organize some sort of preliminary agenda.
In fact, if you would like to take up the question of “racial
heredityry factors" I would be happy to get a group together that
would focus on this subject.

I am grateful for the invitation to appear before the
Republican Task Force on Population Planning and I hope I may
have an opportunity to do so at some future date. I am afraid I
will not be able to come to Washington in early September.

IT am afraid that the Academy's position on this subject may
have been presented somewhat ambiguously and I can certainly rell
you what my own is. We ought to have no hesitation in supporting
good research that had any reasonable prospect of giving scientifically
sound answeres on racial differences. The kind of methodology that
Shockley and to a lesser extent Jensen had been proposing is so
flimsy that many people, including myself, believe that it is likely
to do much more harm than good just in terms of any prospective
clarification of the basic issues. There is on the other hand a lot
of work already going on and, of course, there should be much more
on the identification of individual genetic factors that can influence
intellectual development including those which show some difference in
frequency among the races. At the present time no one knows how to do
a critical experiment that can answer questions about inherent biological
ability along racial lines that would {isolate the determination from
the prejudices of the investigator and of the community in which people
actually develop. As we learn more about the biochemistry of the
development of the brain which many of us are working hard to do, we
may eventually come to the possibility of answering these kinds of
questions. I am becoming more and more impressed with evidence for
prenatal influences, especially nutritional on brain development and
there is even some reason to expect some of these effects of inadequate
digestation to impair the ability of the offspring to function as
effective mothers.

over

t

Nt
McCloskey ~ 2 -

I am enclosing a few notes on this subject that I hope you
can take the time to go into and I believe they do not require
as much scientific training as their fewmidable titles might in-
dicate. Also, if you could communicate these remarks to your task
force I would be most appreciative.

Sincerely yours,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics

Enclosures
JIL/rr