March 10, 1977
Dear Maxine,
I have enjoyed reading your recent comments about the question of cloning of DNA. Enclosed you will find a preprint that I thought would be of interest to you. Essentially what our group here in Seattle has found is that the prokaryotic/eukaryotic barrier as postulated by Sinsheimer does not occur in nature. We have found that a small portion of a plasmid present in Agrobacterium tumefaciens is transferred to plant tissue in the course of producing tumors in the
host plant.
I probably will be interviewed over a local radio station in the next couple of weeks. I would be very grateful if you could send me any sort of general literature that you may have. Stanley Cohen's recent article in Science, I thought, was very well taken; although some of the people at the University of Washington who have opposed DNA cloning experiments have pointed out a couple of weak points in his arguments. Anything you have along these lines would be very helpful, as I feel I might be in for a hard time during the course of the program.
Thanks very much in advance for your help.
Sincerely yours,
Milton P. Gordon
Professor of Biochemistry