COPY FROM

        COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS AND SURGEONS

   020 WEST 168~~ STREET, NEW YORK 32. N. Y.

DEPARTMENT OF MEDICINE

April 26th, 1954

Dr. A. Wetmore, Home Secretary,
National Academy of Sciences,
2101 Constitution Avenue,
Washington 25, D&.

Dear Dr. Wetmore,

        In accordance with your letter of December 2, 1953
I am enclosing herewith a complete bibliography and a short curriculum
                                                                  --
vitae, to which I can add the followingr

        Home environmentras a childr Yy father, a traveling salesman,
left much of the education of my brother and myself to my mother, who taught
us the equivalent of a primary school education at home. Neither my mother
born in Norfolk, Virginia, nor my father, born in Philadelphia, had had the
advantages of a college education, but they had read widely, exposed us at
a very early age to concerts, museums of art and natural history, and
insisted on a speaking knowledge of French and German.

        At the age of eight I had decided to be a chemist, without any
very clear idea why.  Shortly afterward I was given a camera and a microscope
and did my own developing and printing and made many slides.

        After several years in public grammar school I was sent on a
partial scholarship to the then Workingmen's School of the Ethical Culture
Society, a religious group of which my parents were members.  In their High
School I was able to take courses of a year each in Botany, Zoology, physics
and Chemistry, and four years of advanced mathematics, an excellent preparation
for the career in chemistry I was determined upon* I also studied clarinet, and
have kept on playing.

        Although my father was not well able to afford to expense,
he sent me abroad after I had received the Ph.D. degree.  The resulting
year's experience with vl;illstRtter in Zurich was of enormous benefit and was
directly responsible for my first job, on my return, at the Rockefeller
Institute for Medical Research.

         Other major influencesr  There, in nine years of synthebic organic
chemical research in chemotherapy, under Dr. Walter A. Jacobs, X learned many
new techniques and best of all, how to carry forward many different things at
the same time,


        My first exposure to immunology resulted from Dr. Karl
Landsteiner's interest in the immunological properties of crystalline
oxyhemoglobin, which I prepared in Dr. D. D. Van Slyke's laboratory.
While working on this, Dr. 0. T1 Avery proposed that I join him in
elucidating the nature of the so-called *soluble specific substances"
of pneumococcus, and it was this work that made an fmmunochemist of me,
These substances, determinants of the type-specificity of pneumococcus,
seemed ideal reagents for the study of the mechanisms of imnune reactions,
and it was this field, developed through the introduction of quantitative
analytical micro-methods, that I have pursued since, at the College of
Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University.

Sincerely yours,

Michael Heidelberger