FEDERAL SECURITY AGENCY
PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE

 

IN REPLYING, ADDRESS THE

Tuberculosis Research Laboratory,
411 East 69th St., New York 21, N. Y.

January 31, 1951.

Dr. Joshua Lederberg,
Department of Genetics,

The University of Wisconsin,
College of Agriculture,
Madison 6, Wisconsin.

Dear Joshua:

I should like to nominate you for the Eli Lilly award in
bacteriology, unless this is already being taken care of by someone
else. I am assuming that your critical comments on thé institutder
last summer were intended more to tease me than to indicate an unwill-
ingness to be considered for the prize yourself3 As I am already too
old for this sort of thing (i.e., the prize, not the kidding), it would
give me great pleasure to make this nomination, If you would like to
have me proceed, would you mind sending me a brief biographical sketch,
including date of birth and list of publications.

There is not too much new here. I am sorry you found my
picture of negative syntrophiam unclear, but some day we will straighten
it out. We are pretty certain of the structure of Compound X which
seems to be a d@hydrq shikimic acid; this unfortunately is not far
enough back to tell us where the. ring closure takes place. Meanwhile
we have just found another,precursor that will eventually have to be
isolated, and Werner has made fine progress in getting the pantothenate
synthesizing enzyme in a cell-free state. It seems to require ATP as
an energy source, but no dialyzable coenzyme.

With best regards,
Sincerely yours,
perce
Bernard D. Davis

BDD/h1