FACULTY OF MEDICINE
DEPARTMENT OF THE HISTORY OF
   MEDICINE AND SCIENCE
      604-228-4489
Dr. Joshua Lederberg
Department of Genetics
School of Medicine
Stanford University
Stanford, California
94305
THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
         2075WESBROOKPLACE
     VANCOUVER, B.C., CANADA
           V6T 1W5
September 8, 1977
Dear Professor Lederberg:
     Thank you for your most interesting note of 29 August, 1977 with
your comments on Young Endeavour and Creative Minds in Medicine.   I am
sorry I made a mistake about your advent at Yale.  It is some years since
I met with Ed Tatum on the Board of Muscular Dystrophy where he served us
so well.  When I have next occasion to refer to your remarkable career in
print I shall correct the impression concerning Yale University.   I wish
also that you had finished Medicine but perhaps it would have delayed your
great discoveries.  We have missed half a dozen first class men here who
take their Ph.D.'s with us or who arrive with a Ph.D., and I wish so much
that they would do their medical degree.  It would be something to fall
back on economically if they had to, as research grants get chopped right
and left, but also it would give them status on the hospital wards, which
sometimes is very necessary.
     I do not know when I have enjoyed so much reading a personal
biography as I did that which you sent on such a marvelous long telegraphic
type of paper.  In case you have not seen the volume celebrating the 70th
birthday of Francis 0. Schmitt, may I give you the details?   "The
Neurosciences:  Paths of Discovery", by Fredric G. Worden, Judith Swazey and
George Adelman, Editors.  MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1975.   It has 30
interesting autobiographical sketches by researchers who tell how they became
interested in their particular field.  Some are better done than others, but
in general it is a facinating volume of 622 pages.
     I note that you have marked the papers sent to me as personal and
not for publication and I will certainly adhere to that warning and request!
    The book with Jack Eccles that I am writing on Sherrington is almost
completed now but I must say that I feel weak and fatigued when I contemplate
the amount of writing which Sherrington did in his 95 years.  And yet he was
the most diffident of diminutive men, with a kindly bright eye and always
time to help students.  Alan Gregg listed him among the five or six greatest
people he had met in his life.
. . .  2

     I may be going to see branches of the U.B.C. Alumni Association in
California in mid November and if so will try to get in to see you briefly.
My father was a great Stanford man in the days of Terman and Cubberley in
education but it is now years since I was on the campus, during Wallace
Sterling's regime.  I was telling Warren Howell the bookseller who was here
the other day from San Francisco that he should get Sterling to raise the
money for a History of Science and Medicine collection at Stanford.   Howell
claims that it is largely in boxes in the basement.
     I have also to go down to Los Angeles to inspect the Gerry Lewis Muscle
Research Center at U.C.L.A. next to the Brain Research Institute.   I see that
he raised $26.8 million on Labour Day Telethon, which must be a record for a
20 hour performance.  While I am no longer Chairman of their Scientific Advisory
Committee I take a lot of pleasure in seeing my original programs being implemented
insofar as concentrating on university centers is concerned, with a task force on
the screening of new chemicals as possible therapeutic agents.
With every good wish,
WCG:cs
Yours sincerely,
l&u&
William C. Gibson, M.D., F.R.C.P.
Head, Department of the History
of Medicine and Science