UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES

 

 

BERKELEY * DAVIS * IRVINE * LOS ANGELES * RIVERSIDE + SAN DIEGO * SAN FRANCISCO SANTA BARBARA * SANTA CRUZ

 

 

 

DEPARTMENT OF BIOLOGICAL CHEMISTRY
SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

THE CENTER FOR THE HEALTH SCIENCES
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90024

August 12, 1977

Dr. Joshua Lederberg

Department of Genetics

Stanford University Medical Center
Stanford, California 94305

Dear Dr. Lederberg:

I am writing in reply to your letter about a memoir for Ed Tatum.
I am afraid I can't be as helpful as I would like in that I was an under-
graduate in 1940 rather than a graduate student.

Let me tell you what I can. I remember well the course that Ed gave
on Comparative Biochemistry; I was enrolled in it. I believe the year that
I took the course was the academic year 1941-42, i.e., the first year that
I was a graduate student. I liked the course because it was the first time
that intermediary metabolism made much sense to me in the Tatum made
metabolic pathways understandable, as they were known in those days, by
consolidating information from a variety of sources and describing pathways
in a variety of organisms, It was my first introduction to bacterial
metabolism and it was the following year or so that I took a short version
of the famous course given by C.B. van Niel, normally at Hopkins Institute,
but given at Stanford during the war years. I am sorry that I have no
written records of either course, He and Ed Tatum collaborated in giving the A/fie~
course and once again it was a most enjoyable experience. My own recollections
of the development of the work on Neurospora are not very good. This is be-
cause, in part, I was a graduate student in Chemistry rather than in Biology.
My first real contact with Neurospora came, when at the recommendation of
Hubert Loring, Beadle and Tatum offered me a Nutrition Foundation Fellowship
to carry out my graduate work. The problem was really a collaboration between
Loring, Tatum and Beadle, although our publications did not carry Beadle and
Tatum's names, My problem was to investigate further the nutritional require-
ments of the purine and pyrimidine requiring mutants of Neurospora. These
studies turned out very well and I believe were the first, following the work
of Fries showing that there were some nucleic acid derivatives which could
indeed serve as growth factors. Thus, I am afraid I came into the picture a
Page 2

little too late to really give you any clear information of development of
ideas concerning Neurospora and Ed Tatum's contributions to them. My
memories of Ed Tatum are those of an excellent teacher and good friend; the
comparative biochemistry course was an outstanding one. He was a member of
my dissertation committee.

If there is any other way that I can be of help I will be glad to.
If you haven't already done so you might contact Carlton Schwerdt in the
Microbiology Department at Stanford to see what his recollections are. He
became a graduate student two years before I did and may have a more direct
recollection of some of the events leading to the work on Neurospora.

Sincerely yours,

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“John G, Pierce

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