June £8, 1968

Dr. Harry Eagle

Department of Cell Biology

Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Bronx, New York 10461

Dear Harry:

As soon as I received the call for nominations for president of the National
Academy of Sciences, Harrison Brown's name came immediately to mind, much as
it did to many other members. Anyhow, I did discover veey soon that Carl
Djerassi had a similar thought. We communicated with Charlie Yanofsky as a
local member of the nominating committee, and received some advice from him
which we promptly implemented. This advice was to collect enough names to
assure that Brown could, if necessary, be placed on the ballot by petition,
but to communicate this information first informally to the nominating com-
mittee. We had no communication with Brown except to ask his acquiescence
to our circulating the petitions.

Carl and I set out to collect the names for such a petition, sending out the
form letter enclosed, and made no other effort to solicit interest in this
proposal. We did not try to cover the entire membership of the Academy, and
certainly did not have to, in view of the very large number of responses that
we promptly received. These are still trickling in, but I venture to forward
the attached list, which has the names of 128 members who have already returned
their signatures. a

We submit this to you for the nominating committee's information as an indica-
tion of the high esteem in which Harrison Brown is so widely held. If there
is any further service that we can do, please let us know.

Sincerely yours,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics