October 18, 1972
Dear Professor Lederberg:
Your letter of October 13, has just come to my attention.  Yes, we do have in the Manuscript Unit some papers of the late Dr. Oswald Avery and enclosed is a copy of our register describing these papers.  I am sorry to say there are no letters in the collection to or from Harriett Ephrussi-Taylor or Fred Griffith.  And all the letters, save the famous 1943 one, of Dr. Avery deal with family affairs.   I know this will be disappointing to you.
Not long ago, Mrs. Roy Avery brought to us some few additional papers pertaining to Dr. Avery which have not yet been processed and catalogued.  I have gone through them this morning and find one letter from Harriett Ephrussi-Taylor written from Paris October 20, 1948, which will not help you but is extremely interesting in that she writes two pages about the "trial" of Mendelian genetics in Russia.  She also writes about her work and that of her husband, Boris, in Paris.  This is a most interesting letter; it was not written between 1943-1946, but I believe you might like a copy.
Included with the material that Mrs. Avery recently brought to us is a rough draft of a talk "The Commonwealth of Science" with corrections, insertions, etc., in the handwriting of Dr. Oswald Avery (10 typed pages).  Also there is an outline (8
typed pages) titled "Transformation of Pneumococcal Types" with a few handwritten insertions by Dr. Avery.  The last line of the latter states "The evidence presented supports the belief that a nucleic acid of the desoxyribose type is the fundamental unit of the transforming principle of Pneumococcus Type III."  I imagine both of these were given as talks or published.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Very truly yours,
(Miss) Mary Washington Fraser
Senior Archivist