THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

          MEDICAL SCHOOL

DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN GENETICS
1137 E. CATHERINE STREET
ANN ARBOR. MICHIGAN
48104

March 30, 1973

Dr. Joshua Lederberg
Stanford University Medical Center
Stanford University School of Medicine
Stanford, California 94305

Dear Josh:

  Stimulated by our recent conversation in California and by yours
of March 12, I have during this past week made the best effort I can
to recall (and still be honest) the contacts between Columbia and the
"new genetics" at the Rockefeller Institute during my tenure as a NRC
Fellow at Columbia in 1941-42.  The two things that I am really sure
of is that a) I do not have photographic recall and b) in retrospect
I didn't keep the right notes on the right things that happened.

  I am quite sure that sometime during that fellowship, probably in
1942 rather than 1941, I made either one or two trips to the Rockefeller
Institute, probably in the company of Dobzhansky, in the course of which
I met Landsteiner and Avery.  I am inclined to believe it was one trip,
and that visit to Landsteiner was planned, since I was then a budding
human geneticist and this was after all the man who had discovered human
blood groups.  I have a clear mental picture of meeting Avery, probably
because his unprepossessing appearance simply didn't fit in with my
mental image of those intellectual giants at the Institute.  I don't
know whether we planned the visit to Avery's lab or it was a kind of
incidental development during the day.  I do have the impression that
Dobzhansky, if that indeed was the person who had me in tow, was well
aware of Avery's findings, and that there was some chit-chat about how
strange they were.

  Should you be interested in attempting to pin this exchange down
even more, I would urge you to write both to Dunn and Dobzhansky.   It
seems possible that given the above account, one or the other could
fill in the necessary details. More than that, their memories right
now are probably better than mine!

Best regards,
A

   V.;_Neel, M.D.
Lee R. Dice University Professor
of Human Genetics

JVN:rj