STANFORD UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER

DEPARTMENT OF GENETICS

April 15, 1977

Dr. Alton Meister

Chairman, Dept. 6f*Biochemistry
Cornell Univesity Medical College
1300 York Ave.

New York, N.Y. 10021

Dear Alton,

I was just talking to Norton Zinder, and in passing mentioned some of the
considerations that are efficiently summarized in the enclosed letter to the
principal of Stuyvesant High School.

He reminded me that your father was the Dr. Meister whom I believe I had
met and certainly knew very well by reputation as the founding principal of
Bronx High School of Science. (It is hard to believe that I would not have gone
there, except that I started high school myself just a year or two before Bronx
Science was started.)

I really have had almost no luck in finding any documentation to describe
either the rationale behind the development of the special schools like Styuve-
sant and Bronx High, much less the policy struggles that must have attended their
establishment, or any kind of retrospective evaluation of their undoubtedly critical
role in the recruitment of a whole generation of contemporary American scientists.

So I wondered if either through your personal recollections and discussions
with your father, or through records that might still be extant, it would be
possible to retrieve any further documentary background for these issues.

I don't know whether the obscuration of this material is entirely a coin-
cidence.. There is certainly a substantial movement among class-struggle-oriented
critics that does whatever it can to conceal ordistort the enormous class mo-
bility that eventuated in New York City in large measure precisely through the
availability of the educational opportunities of those schools. Some of this
is hinted at in the book by Kessner mentioned in the enclosure.

Anyhow, any light that you can. threw on this, however obvious or taken for
granted it might appear to be, would probably be helpful and would certainly

be appreciated.

Sincerely yours,

 

Jéshua Lederberg
rofessor of Genetics

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