Thank you for your letter renewing permission to use your picture. The
caption will be : (1) Cells of Bacterium coli known to be genetically
diploid. (by permission of Dr. Lederberg).
I trust this will be O.K. And I entirely understand your misgivings
lest your views should be misunderstood. Set your mind at rest!
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Naturally, I shall discuss the appearance of various types of bacterial nucleus
believed to be diploid or polyphloid. But I don't anticipate any difficulty by people attributing my views to anybody
but myself.
I am exceedingly glad to know that I have convinced you of the correctness of
my interpretation of those dam[SIC]-silly "mitotic spindles", but don't quite get
the meaning of the last paragraph. Is the "one supporter" (your quotes and italics) mine or DeLamater's? And
what is wrong with the "rationale of mitotic division or its equivalent" (my quotes ) which I have been
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backing for years -- and which is accepted by 99% of cytologists?
The work of Jinks, Cavalli and Co. seems to call for the same solitary, reductionally dividing chromosomes which is so obvious
cytologically. And in the programme for the next meeting of the Soc. Gen. Microbiol. I observe : R.C. Clowes and D. Rowley
(Wright-Fleming Inst.) Evidence for the unity of two of the postulated chromosomes in E. coli, K12."
I don't quite know, as I say, whether you are still nostalgically hoping for cytological evidence of a multiple-chromosome-equational
mitosis in bacteria. But if so, why?
Where alternative genetical theories
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are available, some of which exactly fit the cytological evidence (as agreed by an overwhelming majority of observers), whereas
others have no cytological support at all - - surely the formes must be accorded weight!
As one rank and outspoken man to another, you'll forgive me for being so frank in this case also.
I enclose a print of that genial giant Oscillospira (a proved bacterium). What other possible interpretation can be put on
these structures? They seem absolutely indisputable examples of the transverse rods which Robinson
figured so clearly ten years ago or more.
