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February 9, 1976 S20 lewd
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Dr. Harry Paul .
Department of History by tow oe te Lea
University of Florida the Genes os
Gainesville, Florida Raed yobs
Dear Dr. Paul,
I was interested to see how many different things I found of t
particular interest to my own studies in your book "The Sorceredgs a

Apprentice"; even though I have to say I had looked into it to get some
further illumination on the relationships of Louis Pasteur and Robert
Koch, which I did not find.

I still want to ask you whether you could point me to some other
sources that might bear upon these two men and particularly the extent
to which their personal, religious, and nationalistic conflicts might
have bornedirectly on their scientific work. I have read the conventional
biographies of Pasteur but have not found very much on Koch for the other
side.

You made some remarks on page 73 that I was at first tempted to
challenge - that German chemistry had in fact made much use of topology
and had gone really deeply into the prediction and renumeration of
carbon compounds. In one of my disparate scientific incarnations I have
actually done quite a bit of work on the combinatorics of organic
chemistry and my inclination would have been,to deplore how inadequate
was the use of some fairly elementary mathematical reasoning in exploring
the domain of hypothetical structures. I am reminded, however, of the
very early and creative work of van't Hoff and Le Bel and their use of
topological reasoning at a very fundamental level and I guess this is
really what you meant in your remark. In fact, I would be interested in to
references to the sources that you used for this particular part of your
discussion or are you drawing primarily on Duhem,reference 52. Where, for
instance, is the Kekule Memorial Lecture by F.R. Japp?

While I would certainly appreciate any bibliographic help you can
give me in response to these questions, let me thank you first of all for
your book itself.

Sincerely yours,

Exe Scientist § krwge

, , Joshua Lederberg
(ours Serre Ye 44 Professor of Genetics

JL/rr

LT. J. PL. RENNEDY. j[X. LARORATORIE£S FOR MOLECULAR MEDICINE, DEDICATED TO RESEARCH IN MENTAL RETARDATION

MOLECULAR BIOLOGY HEREDITY NEUROBIOLOGY NEVELOUMENTAL MEDICINE