April %th, 1954

Dr. A. Wetmore, Home Secretary,
National Academy of Sciences,
2301 Constitution Avenue,
Washington 25, D.C.

Dear Dr. Wetmore,

In accordance with your letter of December 2, 1953

I ain enclosing herewith a complete bibliography and 8 short yrriculwn
wit@e, to which 3 can add the followings

          How envimmntzas a child;  F4y father, a traveling salesman,
left much of the education of my brother and myself to my mather, who taught
us the equivalent of a primary school education at home. Neither my mother,
born in Norfolk, Virginia, nor oy father, bcrn in Philadelphia, had had the
advantages of a college education, but they had read widely, exposed us at
a very early age to concarts, museums of art and natural history, and
insisted on a speaking knowledqe of Fmnch and German,

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

After several years in public graamar school I wos sent on a

                          In their High

partial scholarship to the then irlorkfnpen' s School of the Ethical Culture
Society, a religious group of which my parents were members.
School, S was able to taka courses of a year each in Botany, Zoology, Physics
end Chemistry, and four years of advanced mthmtfcs, an excellent preparation
for the career in chemistry I was determined upon.
have kept on playing.

I also studied clarinet, and

Although my father was not well able to afford to expenseD

ha sent me abroad after I had received the Ph.D. degree.
year's experience with villstltter in Zurich was of enormous benefit and was
directly responsible for my first job, on my return, at the Rockefeller
Institute for fd edical Research.

The resulting

Other maor influencesr

There, in nine years of synthetic organic

chemical research in chemotherapy, under Dr. Walter A. Jacobs, I learned many
new techniques and best of all, how to carry forward many different things at
the ~pl~e ti=.

        My first exposure to iffwgunology resulted from Dr.  gar1
Lmdsteiner's interest in the iwmunologicel properties of crystalline
oxyhemoglobin, which I prepared in Dr. D. D. Van S1yke.s laboratory.
While working on this, Dr. 0. T. Awry proposed that I join him in
elucidating the nature of the so-called "solublo specific substancesH
of p~uwococcus, and it was this work that made an inmunochemist of me.
These substances, determinants of the type-specifioity of pne~m~coccu~,
seemed ideal reagents for the study of the nwchanims of irnmune reactions,
and it was thiri; field, developed through the introduction of quantitative
analytical tnicro-methode, that I have pursued since, at the College of
Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University.

Sincerely ywao

Michael Hefdslbelrger