November 6, 1950
Dear Tracy,
I read with great interest your recent article on cytoplasmic inheritance in the latest issue of the Scientific American.  I was particularly interested in your implication that investigators other than the Lindegrens had attempted to repeat the melibiose experiment and failed.  I would deeply appreciate it if you would let me have the reference to these because it appears to have escaped my attention.  It so happens that I am at present setting up experiments testing the transmission of the galactose system through meiosis.  We have learned a good deal about the cytoplasmic transmission through ordinary vegetative divisions.  We are using this knowledge to examine the situation which obtains during segregation.  It might perhaps be better to do this with the original melibiose system.  However, the original strains were never available to me after I left Washington and from their data (which apparently nobody reads) they were not available to the Lindegrens at the time they supposedly repeated the experiment.
Sincerely yours,
S. Spiegelman