LA

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ALAMOS SCIENTIFIC LABORATORY
(Contracr W-7405-ENG-36)
P.O. Box 1663
LOS ALAMOS, NEW MEXICO

IN REPLY

REFERTO: ADSP January 25, 1961

Dr. Joshua Lederberg
Stanford University Medical Center
Palo Alto, California

Dear Dr. Lederberg:

The Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory is planning a series of Summer
Evening Lectures to be given this summer at Los Alamos by distinguished
scholars in various fields of science. I am writing to ask whether you
would be willing to give one of these lectures on some aspect of your
very interesting work in exobiology. The Laboratory will defray your
expenses incident to travel and subsistence and offer you an honorarium
of three hundred dollars ($300).

Our Summer Evening Lectures are held in our Laboratory auditorium
and are open to the public. We usually have an audience of some five
hundred people consisting mainly of our professional scientists, with
the balance composed of wives, school teachers, and a few teen-aged
children. We visualize scholarly talks aimed at what one might call
the intelligent lay public. Our purpose in these lectures is to foster
something of an academic atmosphere in our geographically isolated
community .«

Dr. George Beadle, who gave an evening lecture here a few years ago,
assures us that you could address this group in a truly elegant manner.
In addition, I think you might enjoy spending a few hours or a day here
with Dr. Wright Langham and his radiobiology research group whose work in
radiation biology you would undoubtedly find interesting. The group is
actively engaged in studying effects of low-level irradiation of successive
generations of mice on the viability of the species. It also has an interest
in radiation problems of space and is collaborating with the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in developing a detector to measure the gamma-ray spectrum of the
lunar surface sometime in 1962.

I hope you will react favorably to this invitation and that we may have
you here sometime this summer.

Very truly yours,

Jl ti—

N. E. Bradb
Director
WHC/de

ec: W. H. Langham
W. H. Crew