5 
Bob Huebner was at the airport to catch this very plane for San Fran- 
cisco and I spoke with him briefly, but since our relationship has never 
left that of conversation restricted to virology, I broke it off to attend 
to Paul and Jill who were already waiting and Ralph, who was standing by. 
Bob is probably partly right in his ideas on integrated "oncogenesis", but 
he is faced with the problem of where to go with these ideas. We are a bit 
better off with the etiological agents of kuru, C-J disease, scrapie and 
mink encephalopathy in our hands. 
Bob Ledeen has found very different cerebral ganglioside patterns 
in chimpanzees with kuru from those with C-J disease, and this comes to 
me as a surprise. The data are consistent and significant, and yet, we 
do not know what they mean. We must pursue this further and see if it holds 
up for human brain and brains of spider or squirrel monkeys with the same 
diseases. Basically, the cellular pathology is so much the same in the 
two diseases that I did not expect this. We must also look at scrapie and 
TME. Of course, we may only be looking at secondary effects of the cell 
damage caused by the agents, and not at anything primary to virus synthesis, 
as we originally hoped might be the case. 
Siakotos is enthusiastic to go on with our banding and purification 
of scrapie, and I am encouraging Joe to get more tissue to him promptly. 
Roger Traub is anxious to get involved in this work and to devote himeslf 
to the basic molecular chemistry of the scrapie-kuru group of agents, which 
is now the key question. 
Yavine is very much alone, going alone to junior high school, left out 
of much of the Micronesians ' comaraderie. Very fortunately, Mbaginta'o is 
close to him. Whether he can handle the U.S. eighth grade standards, into 
which he has been suddenly plunged, is a grave problem, and I am worried 
about leaving him. I need the open skies and the quiet nights of the South 
Pacific — very badly. 
Over Utah (Colorado River),., one hour out of San Francisco 
...An hour and a half long conference with Bob Huebner, who is com- 
pletely ’turned on’ with his oncogene hypothesis and sees all of tumor 
virology resolved by his armchair ideas I Yet, he and his group have done 
much and are backed up by some solid lab work. I have arranged two col- 
laborative projects with him; 1) inoculation of chimps and monkeys with a 
tissue culture line of his "wild mice C-type virus", which causes slow 
progressive noninflammatory paralytic disease in Swiss mice when given 
intracerebrally about one to two months after inoculation. The neurons 
show budding of the oncornavirus from their surface; and 2) study of our 
active scrapie-affected mice (plus some aged controls) for GSl, GS3 
and envelope antigens to mouse C-type viruses , and for mouse C-type virus 
reverse transcriptase. It now rests on getting Joe Gibbs’ enthusiasm 
about these projects. Joe is more depressed — as Marion and Dave Asher 
and others see it — than I see and, yet, I too can see his disaffection. 
I have failed to reward him with captainship of a tight battleship, and 
have given him only a floundering whale boat in which to reach unknown 
shores. If I can only convince him that this is the best way to cap one’s 
career — Torres’ and Captain Bligh’s great voyages in small lifeboats were 
their best — he might revive his enthusiasm and interest. That is the task 
before me. 
