GREE ELLER UNE MAY 27 1989 een gee os. FEB 2S Ge, CONFIDENTIAL February 12, 1980. President Joshua Lederberg, The Rockefeller University, 1230 York, at 66th Street, NEW YORK, N.Y. 10021. Dear Josh, Further to your kind note and our telephone conversation I am writing to recommend three people to you that I think might serve very well indeed on your council. The first is the Honourable John Valentine Clyne, Chancellor of the University of British Columbia, former Supreme Court judge, outstanding marine lawyer during World War II, and head of MacMillan Bloedel, the forest giant of Canada. He has many connections with boards of directors in the United States and internationally and is a highly respected citizen interested in parks, the theatre, and most recently chairman of a Royal Commission for the Canadian Government on tele~communications of all sorts as well as broadcasting both private and public. I think Mr. Clyne may be known to members of the Rocke- feller family and was one of the hosts when the Trilateral group met here a few years ago when we had the pleasure of seeing John D. Rockefeller the Third. I think I told you that when he asked me if we had taken Dr. Alan Gregg's advice on our medical school, I replied that we were doing it gradually. In fact we shall be opening the University Hospital on campus which Gregg, Penfield, and others recommended to us in 1946, on May 16th next. Chancellor Clyne has been a supporter of this hospital since the beginning of our medical school in 1950 and I think his understanding of medical research would be of great value and support to you. As mentioned on the telephone to you, the second potential council member whom I would recommend to you is Sir Richard Doll, F.R.S., well known for his work on cancer of the lung in heavy smokers, asbestos workers etcetra, and just retiring now from the Regius professorship of medicine at Oxford University. His inter- national stature and his great administrative ability I think would be of value to you and to your council. As you will recall, he was recently awarded the $100,000 General Motors prize for his work on cancer. He is just becoming now the Warden of Cecil Green's new college at Oxford for clinical medical students, in which he seeks to combine the best of the Oxford tutorial system, applied to the clinical years, together with leaders in the social sciences 3 aoe Ze w OF me et dete HER Cente tap He L eee, / e Universities Council of British Columbia, Ste. 500, 805 West Broadway, Vancouver, B.C. V5Z 1K1 : (604) 872-0245 President Joshua Lederberg, Rockefeller University. (cont'd.) and in engineering as applied to the biological sciences. Sir Richard is well known in the United States and I think of all the names I could suggest to you, he could be the most helpful in a number of important ways. The third suggestion I would make, is Dr. William Feindel, M.D. McGill, D.Phil. Oxford, who is Wilder Penfield's successor as director of the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University. He is still an active neuro-surgeon and scientific researcher on the brain who has great administrative gifts and is in the forefront of the rapidly developing field of positron emission tomography. He is a trustee of the Osler Library at McGill University, a member of many international societies and a member of the neuro-sciences panel of the World Health Organization at Geneva. I overlapped with him for one year on that panel and found him to be an excellent contributor and a most sensible man. As I mentioned to you on the telephone, I have been associated for some years with the group across Canada which worked so closely with the late Lord Mountbatten in developing the Lester Pearson College of the Pacific at Victoria, B.C. which is my home originally. If the three persons I have suggested are not quite suitable we could have another go at it and I could get you some other names. If there is no great rush about this we could discuss it when I go through New York at the end of April to Israel for a brief visit to talk to their university administrators and budget people, together with some of their scientists and medical historians. Thereafter I go to London to give the Annual Oration to the Medical Society of London which has just passed its 200th birthday. I am going to speak to them on “The Cost of Not Doing Medical Research", and I send a copy of a brief editorial I wrote for the JAMA in case you have not seen it. It has stimulated a great deal of re- action, most of it favourable I am glad to say. The Sherrington book with Jack Eccles has been well received and I am now going over R. Gwyn Macfarlane's book "Howard Florey: the Making of a Great Scientist". I propose to make this my next extended editorial in MD Magazine in New York because there has been a very serious miscarriage of justice in not recog- nizing what Florey and "Mickey Maise" Chain did for the world in producing penicillin for use. I was in Florey's little class in pathology at Oxford when he was coming to grips with these matters and I think it is time, forty years later, that we set the record straight. I say this because some clinicians in their second childhood in England are writing entire books where they have got even the fact 180 degrees rotated, and it is terrible to see history mis-recorded. Macfarlane's book is a breathe of fresh President Joshua Lederberg, Rockefeller University. (cont'd.) air and such a study for young scientists starting out today. I do hope that your virus infection is nearing an end. Rest is the only real therapy for virus diseases, but there is no use my prescribing that for you! Honourable Mr. Clyne is 77, I believe, Sir Richard Doll 67, and Dr. Feindel would be 57 I think. It occurs to me that if you want someone younger there is a remarkable man here inter- nationally known in the world of neuro-sciences, Dr. Patrick L. McGeer, who was until recently Minister of Education for British Columbia with a budget just over one billion dollars. He took his Bachelor's Degree at the University of British Columbia and pursued the field of chemistry at Princeton where he took his PhD., returning to his home in Vancouver to take the M.D. degree here in 1956. He would be approximately 52 years old and spends his life between his research laboratory still on weekends where he is working on the biochemistry of mental illness and on such motor diseases as Parkinsonism and Huntington's Chorea. This man has a great grasp on the public's stake in education and in scientific research and has recently split off a smaller ministry which he now heads of Universities, Science and Communications, the latter meaning the satellite transmission of information across Canada and its north country, while he builds something like the Open University in Britain called here the Open Learning Institute in which satellite transmission is going to play an important role. I am sure that one meeting a year he could manage, and he would light up the discussion through his imagination as to what the future holds for us if we give science a greater chance than we are today. His father was a Supreme Court judge and his uncle the outstanding mayor in Vancouver's history. Pat McGeer has all the ability to charm money out of the guardians of it, and at the same time to focus on the essential infra structure for research and research careers. He took over my neurological research laboratories for me in 1959 and has driven them hard ever since, producing from entirely privately supported laboratories something like 1,500 scientific papers with his team of outstanding scientists including Judah Quastel whom you undoubtedly know. For someone to catalyse and galvanize a lay board I can think of no one more useful. Yours sincerely, SM William C. Gib F.LR.C.P.