. .

From Tennessee Archives -- Avery correspondence.

Transcription of a letter from Harriett Ephrussi-Taylor to O.T. Avery,
dated October 20, 1948

[Laboratoire de Genetique
13, rue Pierre Curie
Paris, V.]

Dear Professor,

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  If only I had finished a letter to you one of the innumerable
times I have thought of you,  I should be more content with myself.
I have only one reason for not having done so -- and that is not a
reason,  really, just a feeling.  So long as our legal situation
continues to be irregular over here, I am troubled and haunted when
I try to write to friends in America.   From here America seems
sometimes a haven,  where one can still lead an orderly life. I am
here over a year now,  and our case is still buried in a file
somewhere at the tribunal.  There is nothing we can do with the legal
system, which worked well enough for Napoleon, but which, in our
apathetic 20th century state,  is now grinding slowly to its ruin.
It really makes very little difference to us over here, where
people are so used to having things proceed in an irregular fashion,
because our every day life and relations with friends is just what
it would be if the legal difficulties didn't exist.   But,  as I have
already told you,  I find it difficult to explain to people in the
States.

   Rollin's visit here -- and in England -- was in every way a
success.  Reports have come from the English laboratories that
indicate he captivated the British Isles.   Here in Paris his usual
difficulties with language were augmented by the fact that he had a
French audience.  Nonetheless,  the beautiful work which he reported
came through the strain triumphant.  In personal contacts he won many
friends.   Indeed,  there is afoot a plan to bring Rollin over here for
a year (after our new genetics Institute will be finished) with the
aid of the Centre Nationale.

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   Only very recently my appointment has been made officially.
Through your generous help I was made a charge de Recherche, which is
equivalent to an assistant professorship.  I am very content with
this,  for it is a good beginning.  There are yearly appointments but
are renewed if there is even moderate reason to do so.  Also,  it is an
appointment which permits me to retain my American citizenship, and
that means a great deal to me.  A number of the people on the
committee making appointments, since,  have inquired about you, and
told me effectively, how great an honor it is to have been supported
by you in my application.  I really know this already, very well, and
shall try very hard to justify it.

   From the transformation point of view,  the year has started very
well.  It makes a big difference to start up work after vacation,
with a year's efforts behind one.  I have outlined very concretely
a program for this year,  and have begun a vigorous execution.   I am
interested first of all in analyzing the apparent interaction between
a T.P. [transforming principle] in the cell, and one in the
environment.  This program will go slowly because there is a large
amount of preparative work involved which I shall do entirely myself.
I now have a technician for l/2 a day,  to work on non-routine things
(media glassware etc.  are all taken care of).  She is going to carry
on the work on improving and developing a defined medium for
transformation.  This is also a slow, long range project.   There are
a number of small, less ambitious experiments I hope to work in,
during the year,  more or less to fill out the experiments I did in
New York.  I rather expect Rollin will revolutionize the techniques
of sensitizing,  as soon as he can,  and so I shall leave it all to him.
For the present,  I use our old techniques, with albumin and anti R
where needed.  Last year I found I could separate T.P. from type III
polysaccharide,  in my new technique of preparation -- which resembles
MacLeod's very much.  I hope, thus,  to accumulate during this year
polysaccharide from the mutant Type III forms,  so that by direct study
of the polysaccharide it can be seen how these forms differ -- if they
do differ in a qualitative sense.

   I am invited to England in April,  to the Society of Microbiology
meeting,  at which there is to be a panel discussion of the nature of
the bacterial surface.  Our pneumococcus story touches at so many
points upon the question that I hardly know where to begin.  Already
I am sorting things out in my mind,  because I want to do justice
to the material.  I am thrilled with the idea of visiting England,
which I have always longed to do.   And it will be fun to meet the
English scientists.  At the same time Boris is invited to give a series
of lectures in England and Scotland -- at London, Edinborough and
Glasgow,  where the main genetics laboratories are.   It should be a
grand tour, with Boris doing most of the talking.   He will have one
or two lectures to prepare, and he lectures so well, I shall enjoy
even the reports!

   Perhaps you have seen Medawar's longish paper in the new British
journal,  Heredity.  We both read it with great interest, feel his data
are suggestive, but not quite adequate yet to prove his
"transformation" theory.  It is an extremely difficult thing to prove,
because one cannot work with "pure cultures" of melanoblasts.

   Perhaps also,  you have read of the tremendous "trial" of
Mendelian genetics in Russia.  Being somewhat closer to that state,
Paris has been shaken by it.  Also,  since communists are a recognized
and powerful minority in France,  it is natural that such an event be
of first importance in the Paris press.  One of the leading liberal
papers ran a series of articles by French scientists on the pros
and cons of the "trial".  Boris was asked to write an article, and for
three or four days struggled with the idea of putting something down
on paper.  Each day he got unhappier because it was clear that

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journalism and scientific writing are such different things.   To be a
journalist one has to toss an article off in a few hours time and not
have too much conscience about the precision of what was written.   The
upshot was that he did not write an article, but instead, obtained
the complete report of the "trials", in the Pravda.   (He reads
Russian,  it being his native language.)  The trials -- and it is just
to call them that only because they result in sweeping condemnation
-- were on an enormous scale,  and it took days to read the reports.
I am tempted to write just a little about them, because the issues at
stake are so great,  and few enough people will take the trouble or
have a chance to read the reports.   For us,  reading these records put
an absolute end to any hopes that science played any good role in the
Soviet Union -- or that science could flourish there.   The most
important point is this:  that the merits of Lysenko's work (if they
exist) are of no consequence in the question.   The decisions in
Moscow are not concerned with the scientific merits of the supposed
"two schools of genetics".   There trials are concerned with
establishing once and for all that dialectical materialism is the sole
true doctrine,  and any scientific facts which are irreconcilable
with this doctrine must be discarded as false.  Lysenko has developed
the thesis that modern genetics is "undialectic", a position which
incidentally is totally without reason, and has twisted modern
genetic theory to make it simply things it was never intended to
imply.  By arousing the purely demagogic elements of the communist
party on this basis, he has convinced the highly nationalistic people
that modern genetics is nothing but capitalist propaganda.   The most
significant aspect of the trials,  around the thesis of Lysenko, is the
state of mind of the defendants,  whose speeches will probably never
be translated for the English speaking world.   (Unfortunately everyone
seems to feel it is more important to read Lysenko's speeches, to
gain an impression of what went on.) Three or four of the best
geneticists in Russia defended themselves, but against cat-calls,
boos and interruptions from the floor of the Academy (the Agriculture
Academy).  But on the whole,  it is clear that everyone is in terror
of the consequences of not being on Lysenko's side.  Several, after a
defense of modern genetics,  had to completely turn around and run
into the Lysenko fold -- amid boos and hisses from the assembled
academy members.  All efforts to resist were vanquished when Lysenko
read that the central committee of the communist party supports his
views.  Nothing quite equal has happened to scientific thought since
the Middle Ages -- and because science is now so developed, one can
say never has such a large scale extermination of the scientific
approach to problems occurred before in the history of man.   It is a
crushing story.  The perversion of science by the Soviet Union is
equal to that in Hitler's Germany at its best, though its practical
consequences are not so brutal and so immediate.

   Equally discouraging are the failures of communist-scientists
in England and France to defend what they know to be scientific
fact against destruction by party doctrine.   I have never felt so
strongly before the importance of socialist and liberal organizations
and the kind of thinking they do.  It seems to offer the only hope
for a saner economic management of material resources, which at the
same time permits free thought.  But it is David against a Goliath --
Goliath being a clever, dogmatic and absolute propaganda, spreading
throughout the world.

   These things are very much with us here in Paris.   The love of
our work,  the enthusiasm of our students, and the joy of being
together are the bright sides.  And to the bright side one can add
the feeling that our friends in the U.S. are prospering, and free to
work and think,  in spite of contention of the communists to the
contrary!  What an important, if fallible, counting the U.S. is,
and will be in the years to come.

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   By now you are in Tennessee.   New York will never be the same
again for me --  nor the Institute.  In a way I am glad I wasn't there
when you decided to leave, because I would have been "dead agin" it,
and very unhappy about it.  As it is,  I don't quite believe it yet
and won't until I see it with my own eyes.

     I saw Dr.  Heidelberger, briefly, here in Paris the other day. We
had lunch together, with Dr. Wurmser,  a physical chemist who is
interested in antigen-antibody reactions.  He (Heidelberger) certainly
swims around well in French.  We scarcely used any English for the
two hours of the luncheon.  He looked very well, and had many
interesting adventures on behalf of the U. N.

    Boris' work is going very well.  Effectively,  it is the study of
a mutation in yeast,  induced by acriflavine.   The acriflavine acts
upon yeast cells in some fashion which causes the cell to lose a
group of enzymes.  Cytochrome oxidase,  succinic dehydrogenase are
two which are lost.  This change is hereditary -- but not Mendelian.
That is,  thus far,  the chromosomes do not appear to directly control
the presence or absence of these enzymes.  This is a rather surprising
thing,  in view of the numerous cases in which a single gene appears
to cause the formation of a given enzyme.  At present, he suspects
that the acriflavine acts by inhibiting the reproduction of certain
cytoplasmic particles,  the particles containing the enzymes, and also
being autoreproducing.   He has accumulated a tremendous amount of
genetic and biochemical information which is not easily interpreted
by such an hypothesis, but, of course,  at present it is only a working
hypothesis.  He and his group of workers are in the process of writing
it all up,  to appear before so very long in the Ann. of the Pasteur
Institute.  It makes a very nice story,  and I have to admit that as
experimental material it is just as pretty as the pneumococcus.

   I am going to go back now to today's experiment -- and put some
T.P.  -- that mythical genetic "protein"  -- into some tubes containing
sensitized R cells.

With great affection as always,

Harriett

P.S.  My congratulations to you, on your birthday, which is tomorrow,
     I believe.

.ex
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