March 15
I also apologize for not having written. I called you at your home the day after you left for the Promised Land.
I saw Herb in Houston, and he caught me up on the status of the lab work. The experimental details are a bit dim in my mind right now. I will be proud to have you present some of my stuff at the Cold Spring Symp. The JMB articles were very nice.
I never knew how exciting my life could be until I began on my own project. I really got the fever, working with you, for research. And it keeps getting worse. I awake in the middle of the night with ideas spinning around in my head. I am greatly appreciative of the start you gave me and the advice to strike out for myself.
As you know, I started out to do hybridization studies with human DNA. As you know now, the precision of a reaction with the bulk human DNA is quite poor. So soon after I learned to purify human ribs, DNA and use a MAK column I decided that I needed to find a way to saturate
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the human DNA to get reliable data. As you know for instance human ribs DNA will not saturate the bulk DNA. Therefore I developed ways of fractionating DNA previous to the hybrid reaction. The result is that I can partially thermally melt human DNA and fractionate the single stranded DNA with a nitrocellulose column. In this way I can conc. any given gene 10-100x. In this way I have attained saturation curves in the reaction. Not to sound too sure of myself since I haven't written it up yet, but I soon will. (Next week)
Each step has been fun and I soon hope to begin growing up chromosomally abnormal cells to begin mapping. I am now working on separating out the 5S and the +RNA's.
As I had hoped, I have a very good lab. As I had not expected, there are some good molecular geneticists here. Theo Stacklin, Rolin Monro, Bob Greenberg, Mike Levine, and a fellow named Bob Armstrong who worked with Senoka. They are recruiting more. I have also received a lot of help in cell culture techniques.
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I think the Peds department is disappointing but that does not bother me at present since there are so many good people to talk to.
My family is well settled and doing well. We just bought a house and paid too much for it -- but that's life.
Glad to hear that life is so enjoyable in Rehovat. My best wishes to Joanne and the boys.
Sincerely,
Roy
PS I applied for a grant Feb 1 -- keeping my fingers crossed.
Dear Dan,