University of Wisconsin-Madison

  

Thomas D. Brock
Department of Bacteriology
1550 Linden Drive
Madison, Wisconsin 53706
608-262-1261 (Telex 265-452)

 
  

JUL 15 1985
0

4
RCE oF THE pats

July 10, 1985

Dr. Joshua Lederberg
President, The Rockefeller University
New York, NY 10021

Dear Joshua,

Thank you very much for your recent letters. I was not aware of the
McCarty book and I will look forward to seeing a copy. I assume it is in the
vein of the article which McCarty wrote earlier for one of the Annual
Reviews. Thank you for the unpublished paper in reply to Gunther Stent on the
alleged prematurity of the work of Avery et al. You had not sent me this
earlier. As we all are aware, it is indeed difficult to get insight at this
late date into the thinking of people at the time work was underway. This is
why it is so important to have original documents such as you have kept.

I have just returned from a brief visit to the Institut Pasteur where I
talked at some length with Francois Jacob. I was especially interested in
discovering whether any of the early Monod and Jacob/Wollman material (data
books, correspondence, progress reports, etc.) was still available.
Unfortunately, everything seems to have been thrown out. Jacob showed me data
books of his from 1959 and later but not from the earlier ones. You, of
course, were importantly involved in parallel work to theirs on the discovery
of the Hfr phenomenon and perhaps you have some relevant material from the
Pasteur group. I recently spent a day at the Cal Tech Archives going over the
Max Delbruck material, which is very extensive. Fortunately, Delbruck saved
everything and his archives are extremely well organized by Cal Tech. There
are letters and correspondence in relation to some of this early work that we
are discussing.

I have read Snow's original paper on cholera but I must confess that I
did not see at the time I read it any strong indication that Snow had been
influenced by the discovery of microorganisms via microscopy. I will go back
and examine Snow's paper again sometime.

My work on bacterial genetics moves forward by fits and starts. I now
have a large amount of material from various archives to examine in detail but
there is still much more to obtain. In the meantime, I am involved in
preparing new books on Winogradsky and Koch for English-language readers and
these works may occupy me for a short period of time.

Sincerely,

Jie (Seel

omas D. Brock
E.B. Fred Professor of Natural Sciences
TDB:is

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