DEPARTMENT OF STATE

AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
WASHINGTON, D.C. 20523

January 19, 1976

Joshua Lederberg, M.D.

Professor of Genetics

Stanford University School of Medicine
Stanford, California 94305

Dear Dr. Lederberg;

I was delighted to receive your December 16 letter and have
been doing a considerable amount of work on some specific material to
send back to you. I have to do this work in my spare time in the midst
of a heavy administrative schedule at my regular job and it is not
quite complete.

This letter is an interim reply stimulated in part because
I wanted to call your attention to the conference on capturing the sun
through bioconversion which is scheduled to take place here in Washing-
ton March 10 to 12. I am enclosing several copies of the brochure
which describes this conference. I thought that you and/or some of
the WHO people with whom you are working would be interested in knowing
about this conference and perhaps attending since composting will come
up as one of the topics for discussion.

Meantime, let me say that I am not surprised that you dis-
covered the kinds of attitudes and problems that you recount in your
December 16 letter. Using FAO data and looking at the quantities of
nitrogen that are present in human and animal excreta, I have come up
with the interesting conclusion that there are about 70 million tons
of nitrogen in these materials compared to a total output of 40 million
tons used as chemical fertilizer in the world's annual chemical
fertilizer production. Projecting the human population to 7 billion
in the year 2000, and assuming only a one-half increase in the present
animal population, the organic matter that will be produced at that
time will contain about 100 million tons of nitrogen. This material
is certainly crucial to maintaining and improving yields per acre on
crop lands. It seems to me altogether possible that a deteriation of
the calorie-protein nutrition of the human race (as the food supply
falls behind and population increases over the next 25 years) may become
the most important single health risk that the human race will face
during the rest of this century, I think that any fears that virus or
bacterial pathogens are not adequately destroyed and can create a
serious health problem if they are incorporated into agricultural soils,
pales into insignificance compared to the probable danger of nutritional
deterioration. Indeed, I have noted that there has been little or no
epidemiological evidence that the Chinese have suffered from bacterial
diseases from organisms that have been incorporated into the soil. I am
sure that the transmission cycles have always taken place at much
earlier stages of direct person-to-person contact or by getting into
water supplies. Therefore, while we should keep our eye on the virus
problem and the fact that some viral particles are not destroyed in the
composting processes, it should not seriously deter us from trying to
get composted materials incorporated into active agricultural soils.

I think that in filtration, and biological recycling and disarming, the
soil seems to be our best medium for breaking the cycle of such patho-
genic organisms,

I will be sending you more material that specifically bears
on these matters shortly.

Sincerely yours,

Gerald F. Winfield

Chief, Manpower and
Institutions Division

Office of Population

Enclosures: a/s