CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
PASADENA

DIVISION OF BIOLOGY
~RCKHOFF LABORATORIES OF BIOLOGY September 15, 1952

Dr. Joshua Lederberg
Genetics Department
University of Wisconsin
Madison 6, Wisconsin

Dear Josh,

In the Sept. 5, 1952 number of Science there is an
article on the subject of hearing in porpoises which contains,
among other interesting matters, the word "transducer", I was
surprised to find this term in a context which is about as far
removed from Salmonella Genetics as it easily could be, and so
I looked it up in Webster's New International Dictionary. It is
defined there as follows:"A device activated by power from one
system and supplying power in the same or any other form to
a second system. For example, a telephone receiver..." An
electronics friend tells me that the word is in fairly common
use among electronics engineers, and he pointed out that it
properly could be -and probably has been--used in biology to
refer to the sense organs. Obviously there are many other
potential biological applications of the term.

This, however, did not conclude my hideous discoveries.
My curiosity aroused, I thumbed through this 1936 dictionary
looking for others of the new words of microbial genetics.
I was astonished to find two more of them. One of them--
"syntrophic"” -is, happily,defined in a way which is consonant
with its current usage in microbial genetics. Possibly
you consulted the dictionary before suggesting the use of this
term. However, this can hardly have been the case with
“prototrophic” which Webster defines as follows: “Deriving
nutriment, or the energy of anabolism, from uncombined elements,
as the nitrogen fixing bacteria and sulfur bacteria". There
is no sign that this usage is obsolete. In fact, I found the
word in the first two bacterlology text books I picked up.
(Tanner, Frobisher).

It seems only too evident that the old and the new
definitions of the terms cannot coexist. So far as I can
see, any reasonable solution requires that the new definitions
be withdrawn.

This business naturally raises the question of how much
philological research may be expected of an author who desires
to launch a neologism. I'm not prepared to give a complete
Dr. Joshua Lederberg
September 15, 1952
Page 2.

answer to this at the moment, but I imagine that everybody
will agree that the consulting of an unabridged dictionary
is a minimum requirement.

Beyond this is the more fundamental problem of feciding
in any given instance whether or not the coming of a neologism
1s Justified. There has been a tendency, I think, to fabricate
neologisms merely as a matter of convenience. In my opinion,
convenience by itself is not a sufficient ground. There must
also be a large element of need before a neologism is justified.
Otherwise we will soon have a jargon which is intelligible
only to a priestly class of initiates and which hinders rather
than facilitates communication.

With best regards,

Sincerely yours,

Nema

N. H. Horowitz
nhh:ach

cc: Dr. Francis Ryan