July 28, 1982
Dear Barbara:
Thanks for your letter of July 21 and for the warm hospitality we enjoyed during our recent visit to Bar Harbor. Without question I would be interested in helping to arrange a small meeting there next summer, though I think we might have more fireworks if the theme were more broad -- murine oncogenes rather than the mouse mammary tumor virus -- and if the explicit intent was to see how the resources of Jackson Laboratory could be used as the basis for experiments to challenge some of the ideas coming from recent work with tissue culture and molecular biology. This would require inviting some people who identify murine oncogenes by DNA transformation (Cooper and Weinberg), some who look for genes activated during tumor induction by murine viruses (Tsichlis, us, and others), some who study the homologues of murine virus oncogenes (Goff, Lowy, Verma, Vande Woude and others), plus geneticists familiar with mutations conducive to tumor phenotypes (virus-induced or otherwise) or to developmental disorders (I don't know the best people in this area but Lilly and Rowe would be among them), virologists studying insertion mutations with developmental consequences (Jenkins and Copeland, Jaenisch), and perhaps some students of chemical carcinogenesis (Heidelberger). [Handwritten note in margin] +Ruddle
I realize this may be more than you had in mind - obviously it would require the Seven Seas rather than the Woodlands Cottages. But I am reluctant to settle for a mammary tumor virus meeting since (a) an International MMTV meeting will occur in March, 1983, and (b) many of the people who work on MMTV are rather narrow. Let me know what you think.
Best regards,
Harold E. Varmus, M.D.
Professor