Everybody would be delighted if you could give a seminar here after your visit to San Francisco in late November. We would
pay the extra air fare, for two, which this side trip would entail and all your expenses here, including hotel accommodation,
for two. We'd also suggest you stay two nights here so that your visit isn't too much of a rush. In addition there
would be a very modest honorarium. I suggest you write again to me, at this address, in mid-September (when I'll be back
from Denmark) and we can then start to plan the exact dates. It usually pays to consult the airline schedules before being
too precise and these change from time to time. Naturally you could break your journey at L.A. either on the way here or
on the way back. Incidentally since you are going in any case to visit three U.S. cities there may be a very cheap air fare
for doing all this if you book well in advance. If this seems a sensible thing to aim for we should perhaps try to tie it
all up a little earlier. I'll ask my secretary to look into it but as somebody else is paying you may not want to be
bothered with all that.
Thank you for the papers about fetal antigens. Of course I've known for some time about the possible connection because
when we get interested in embryology Sydney, who had picked up the idea, I think, from something Boyce had just done, wanted
to cultivate tumour lines to help us study fetal antigens which, from many lines of work, especially on Drosophila, we both
thought to be important. (The analogy was the use of myelomas to study antibody molecules.) I thought it a good idea but
I was against doing it then because I thought it would be too much work for Sydney to take on in addition to getting the nematode
system going. The irony of it is that, due to Rothschild, our division at Cambridge now studies the system in reverse. That
is, there is a small section, headed by Ed Lennox (now migrated from the Salk to MRC, Cambridge) who are studying the chemistry
(i.e. the exact chemical nature) of the new surface antigens found on chemically induced tumours. We faintly hope all this
will then spill over onto the work also going on in Cambridge on developmental biology.
I haven't yet read the "magisterial review" by Coggin and Anderson but it seems, on general grounds, rather likely
that to get a tumour you need a new surface antigen of some sort. Surface antigens are probably not easy to produce by any
old process and the cell would do well to use one that has already been evolved to sit nicely in the cell surface. Fetal
antigens are obvious candidates for this. If one adds that chemical carcinogens almost certainly work because they are mutagenic
then, in outline, the whole thing seems fairly clear. It's when one gets down to details and asks nasty, precise, questions
that one sees that, so far, it's all a bit flimsy. But very interesting, all the same, and I certainly feel I should
know more about it.
Nice of you to think of Panspermia for Vogue (curiously enough, we did originally consider Playboy) but I think not at the
moment. I have faint plans for a popular book on the subject, since everybody enjoys hearing about the idea, but it would
really be a peg to hang ideas on The Origin of Life, The Structure of the Universe, The Nature of Science and other Large
Topics.
