19A 
Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea 
June 18, 1972 
Dear Dr. Fox, 
I write because Joe Gibbs has indicated your concern for the relevance of 
the ALPHA HELIX expedition to the NINDS Mission. As you have probably seen, our 
entire Slow Virus program and our entire gamut of studies on virus persistence 
and disease has been an outgrowth of the Study of Child Growth and Development 
and Disease Patterns in Primitive Cultures for which I came to the NIH 15 years 
ago. From our work with South American and Asian tribal groups and isolated and 
primitive groups in Melanesia and Micronesia much of our world wide reputation 
has stemmed. It is from work in these groups that we have obtained the first 
evidence for a slow virus infection of man, and from this work uniquely we of my 
section introduced the concept of slow virus infections of the nervous system of 
man. We continue to develop methods of population genetic study and methods for 
analysis of polygeneic effects on disease expression more successfully from 
study of primitive isolated groups than from any other source of human and 
epidemiological study. These, as our recent transmission of familial C-J 
disease shows, have vast relevance for slow virus infections as well. 
The ALPHA HELIX trip has arrived to solve the problem of continuing and 
extending our many years of committment to studies in these islands on foci of 
familial periodic paralysis (with complete heart block), on CNS defects with 
goiterous cretinism and its relationship to deaf mutism (Rennell and Bellona 
Islands), and to study the population dynamics of the distribution of the only 
alpha-chain hemoglobinopathy of man (which we discovered and molecularly defined 
on these islands years ago) and which has become both an important marker for 
such studies and also important in considerations on human evolution on a 
molecular biological level. We also have advance knowledge of chronic 
degenerative disease syndromes on these islands we wish to pursue in detail. 
These on-going studies alone would fully justify the expedition. There are 
actually dozens of other studies in progress and ready to be extended in these 
island populations. We have never wasted our time on unoriginal research which 
any fool could do because it could be fully outlined and defined in advance, 
but rather, I have sought to seek out new questions and new problems and to 
slowly define them as problems so that other fools than we can later exploit 
them. (My Gal-Tech lecture of a few years ago presents an abridgement, as 
published, of some of these problems .. .and there are a great many others on 
which I have now been working). I do not come to the field with a clear picture 
of what they are or where they will take us, but gradually formulate them in the 
field. It is a basic research method I strongly defend and do not Intend to 
waver from. (Dr. Fox, I hope you will not take offense at my forthright 
language before we have ever had a chance to meet socially. It is more honest 
than mealy-mouthed banter.) 
I would therefore beg your indulgence to continue this approach to 
scientific inquiry which in the case of my section has proven to be rather 
