May 10, 1974

 

Dr. W.D. McElroy

Office of the Chancellor
University of California, San Diego
La Jolla, California 92037

Dear Bill,

I have your letter of May 3rd asking me about attending a
conference on enzyme engineering in the latter part of July.
This is an area in which I really am quite interested for a
number of reasons but I regret that it comes at a rather
awkward time from the standpoint of my personal plans, and I
just do not see how I can attend. It is just possible that I
might be able to get down for one day, including there and back
and if you wished me to proceed on that basis, possibly Wednesday
the 24th would be the preferred date. However, I could understand
it if you did not want to complicate your organization in this
way; and I do not think I could make a firm commitment even for
that limited participation but rather just a contingent one.

Whether or not I am able to contribute anything, I am greedy
enough to hope that I might get the benefit of your deliberations
and would be very much interested in seeing your final document.

Besides the technical problems, I hépe you will be giving some
attention to the institutional and economic issues that inevitably
complicate initiatives of this kind. Have you addressed such questions
as to the character of impediments, if any, to private enterprise
taking major responsibility for technical developments in this field.

I am even concerned about the possibility that federally supported
academic work in this technological area may even impede productive
developments by industry on account of the inevitable problems of
assignment of property rights and the possible discouragement of

private initiatives if there is overt competition from publicly
supported sources. Out of the spectrum of potential opportunities

I am sure that there are some possibilities for which these considerations
are much more cogent than others. This will have to do with the varying
degrees of basic quality to the research that needs to be done, as well
as to the other considerations that might interfere with market-oriented
investment. Private industry is much more interested in the development
of for example antibiotic producing strains which generate a sellable
product than they would be in improved soil bacteria that could be
economically even more important by benefits to agriculture. I do not
know if the group you have assembled is the best qualified to look at
this side of the problem and perhaps a different one would have to be
put together for that particular purpose. I can think of one person
Dr. W.D. McElroy -2- §/10/74

whom you may already know, David Ben-Daniel who works for General
Electric Corporation who is quite persuasively critical of a model

of pure federal subsidy for technical (as opposed to scientific)
investigation.

However, the intrinsic interest of the problem may override all
of these other considerations, and I certainly wish you well.

Sincerely yours,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics

JL/rr