July 9, 1964

Dr. Bernard Rimland

Director, Personnel Measurement Research Department
U. 8. Naval Personnel Research Laboratory

San Diego, California

Dear Dr. Rimland:
Thank you for sending me your monograph, which I read with deep interest.

You certainly do beat the psychogenécists with a heavy rock, but I would
be the last to protest. As you take pains to stress the speculative,
personalistic character of the work you will not expect your reader to
agree on every detail of taste or inference, and I will not trouble you
with my own ‘druthers. You have indeed suggested a number of interesting
lines of research; particularly as regards influences on cerebral circu-
lation they reinforce some of my own vaguer notions, and I will try to
lend any weight I can add to attracting more interest to them.

!
U
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eC AWS

The matter of birth-order statistics has been of some interest here, also
along the lines of the support they could (and often fail to) give to
psychodynamic theory. You seem to have collected much of the literature
on this; if you have any further references I would be grateful to you for
them.

What are the statistics on the “markedly latger labor common in first-
births” - p. 141?

In autism, can you separate partty from maternal age? Are there fertility-—
disturbances in kindreds with autism? Can you calculate an explicit risk
of autism per single, per multiple birth from the data you have scanned?
Will the latterday conservatism in the postnatal use of oxygen show up in

a mitigation of the incidence of autism? (And I am worried not to see a
tighter statistical correlation of autism with retrolental fibropHasia,)
After all, if it were there, it would sew up your hypothesis.

Sincerely yours,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics

P.S. I had read the book and dictated the reply before my secretary passed
your letter on to me, so you succeeded in the aim in your first paragraph,
I will be glad to see you after your arrival here.