INSTITUTUM JUN 9 1965
SERO-BACTERIOLOGICUM
UNIVERSITATIS

HELSINKI Feebsiei cc csssssnanescesraeeensenee _

Dear Josh,

How good of you it is to provide your former students with
charming ideas like those in your letter. To me it seems quite
possible that the first opportunity to find a blood group
synthesizing enzyme might be in the acquisition of the Levis
factor. I had not thought of going back to blood group work but if
necessary sera could be obtained, I would be very tempted to do
what you suggested. Helen is thrilled, too, and would like to
join the work,

Your statistical work interests me and still more my boss,
Renkonen, I once helped him to process some data, and they
suggested a sex-dependent family planning. Out of 26389 Finnish
families starting with either two boys or two girls 67.5 %
had at least one further child while only 65.0 % out of 25479
families starting with a boy and a girl or vice versa had a third
child, Most but not necessarily all of the families had stopped
reproduction at the time the data were collected, Birth intervals
were not known,

#TAjWWG

I would much like to recommend a fellow for your demography
study, mainly for his or her sake; but right now I do not know
a Suitable person,

Helen has probably told you about her, present work more than
I have about mine. I have gone on with antibody formation by
Single cells. My tests with cross reactive bacteriophages in
microdrops demonstrated a clear cellular heterogeneity in the
production of neutralizing anti-T2 (or anti-T4 or anti-T6), Recently
I have studied single anti-hapten cells, The method includes
coupling of a T even bacteriophage with a hapten and testing phage-
inactivation by anti-hapten. When the coupling goes all right, phage
inactivation follows first order reaction kinetics with k values
of a few hundreds. Right now I am coupling T2 with hapten A and T4
with structurally related A’, and shall test Single anti-A cells
with both phages to see whether relative inactivating powers vary,
whether there is cellular heterogeneity in the production of anti-A,

You may be interested in the general post-fellowship activities
of your former fellows. Helen is holding a government investigator’s
job and working in this laboratory. Since April I am an associate
professor of serology and bacteriology. Before that I was docent in
medical genetics, and still give part of the medical genetics course,
We are having a USPHS grant as you may know (we suspect that you were
perhaps consulted before the application was accepted), and both
spend most of the time for research,

You and Esther are probably having standing invitations by most
terrestrial universities, I would like to add Helsinki to the list,
It would be so nice to see you again; and if you happen to be not
too far from here and willing to give a talk, those #200 which the
University pays for distinguished talks would at least cover the

exe cost, p Lia Tr

ry

64-1018a/19