1. Statistical and Mathematical Theory and Applications (excluding Genetics)
2. Genetics, Evolution and Eugenics

There is a link to each group, and each group is chronological and numbered according to its CP designation. Thus a reader can, for example, note in Box's bibliographic list that Fisher's 1922 paper "On the Dominance Ratio" is CP24, go to the web site, and, using Adobe Acrobat Reader, view the entire text and print it out. At this time there are sixty-nine papers available in the Genetics group and more than twice that many in the Statistics group.

Because not all libraries possess the Collected Papers set and because Fisher's work appeared in a wide variety of publications, this Digitization Project is truly a great service. Bennett and Elise Bennetto, the assistant librarian working on this project, are to be commended.

Adelaide University covers several blocks, sloping down to the Torrens River. The Barr Smith Library is centrally located within the University. The Special Collections area is a pleasure in which to work, both because of the cheerful assistance of Susan Woodburn and Elise Bennetto and because of the facilities. There is a large well lit room with a number of tables; there are also several small work areas that can be closed off. A copy machine is conveniently available for the use of patrons.

Near the Library are not only the Student Union, but also the Adelaide Botanic Gardens and the Adelaide Zoo, without which no trip to Australia would be complete.

In response to this situation, the Dibner Fund and Sloan Foundation have joined together to create an experimental program that utilizes internet-based technologies to encourage active scientists and engineers to contribute to the histories of their disciplines (http://hrst.mit.edu). This project, overseen by Jed Buchwald (former director of the Dibner Institute and currently at the California Institute of Technology) is motivated by the conviction that "the skills necessary to comprehend contemporary developments, as well as the vast array of objects that must be examined...make it essential to enlist the direct participation of those who were actively engaged in producing them." [quoted from the website] Two of the first five fields chosen will be of interest to readers of the Mendel Newsletter: bioinformatics and molecular evolution.

Unlike many other internet-based archival projects, the Dibner-Sloan project aims not only to create a digital archive of historically-important documents (whether they be software, computer simulations, scans of correspondence, or electronic versions of published papers), but also to encourage scientists and engineers to put these historical artifacts in what they believe to be their proper historical context. To facilitate this process, the project's core staff have worked hard to put together software packages that will be valuable to today's historically-minded scientists and tomorrow's historians. In addition to developing on-line discussion forums and a collaborative timeline module, the project's software engineers are in the process of building a digital library system that automatically creates within-text hyperlinks that weave a set of documents together. The core staff includes: Babak Ashrafi, Arne Hessenbruch, David McGee, Stephanie Munson, Daniel Tsai, James Voelkel, and Paul Warner.

Each of the five project teams has taken a different approach to the kinds of materials they digitize, as well as the ways in which they encourage the collaboration of scientists and engineers. To give readers a sense of the various trajectories that the projects have taken, I will briefly describe the methodology and currently available archival collections of the bioinformatics and molecular evolution projects.

Timothy Lenoir and a group of graduate students at Stanford University (including Casey Alt, Gabriella Janni, and Zach Pogue) have set out to work with scientists and corporate executives to produce a history of bioinformatics. Their goal is to document not only the emergence of new methods for determining biological function, but also the scientists and institutions who made them. The team has already made a great deal of progress.

In addition to an exhaustive bibliography of nearly every relevant paper ever published in the field of bioinformatics, the team has already assembled an impressive digital archive of documents. The most exciting collection was recently contributed by Stanford University professor Douglas Brutlag and Dr. Peter Friedland of Intraspect Software. This collection includes technical reports relating to the development of MOLGEN, GENET, BIONET, the first computer network for computational molecular biology. It also contains extensive documentation of the activities of IntelliGenetics from 1983-1994, one of the first private companies to build tools for computer-based sequence analysis. The variety of documents on the site ranges from business plans, to phone lists, to mock-ups of graphic interface modules for the company's "Genetic Engineering Workstation" software. Other interesting files include the final text and drafts of a consultation paper that Douglas Brutlag wrote for the United States Patent and Trademark Office regarding genetic sequence patents, as well as a collection of correspondence, reports, and agenda from a series of meetings at the National Institute of Health (NIH) regarding maintenance of the Drosophila genetic database started several decades ago.

The collections are organized in a way that will be intuitive for any historian who has used traditional archives. The best way to describe the architecture of the site is "elegant." Upon clicking on the link for this collection, the viewer is presented with new browser window that contains several clearly labeled icons that look exactly like manila folders. These folder icons open up when clicked to reveal a set of documents represented by an icon in the form of a sheet of paper filled with text. Almost all of these text files have an informative summary that can be accessed by running the cursor over the text icon. In addition to these primary sources, the team is also in the process of uploading digitized versions of "classic papers," donated by Russ Altman, as well as secondary sources from science studies scholars like Evelyn Fox Keller and Stephen Hilgartner.

We have chosen to begin with the development of the notion of "non-Darwinian evolution," or the "neutral theory," advanced most prominently in its earliest years by Motoo Kimura, Tomoko Ohta, Jack King and Thomas Jukes. Though their theories differed in the details, they all argued that the vast majority of mutations at the molecular level were selectively equivalent, or "neutral"; thus, evolution at the molecular level was largely a matter of random genetic drift. Many traditional evolutionary biologists found this idea to be illogical and wrong-headed, and spoke out in defense of the overwhelming significance of natural selection. The ensuing neutralist-selectionist debates had, and continue to have, broad conceptual and methodological ramifications throughout evolutionary biology.

Thus far, we have digitized a great deal of published and unpublished materials on the website. Our first major unpublished source to be scanned is the transcript of the 1963 Macy Conference on Genetics. This conference brought together several well-known geneticists to discuss important issues in population genetics. It took place at a time when debates about the biological effects of atomic radiation were at their peak. Attendees included: Walter Bodmer, James Crow, Everett Dempster, Theodosius Dobzhansky, L.C. Dunn, Barry Falconer, Richard Lewontin, Howard Levene, H.J. Muller, James Neel, Bruce Wallace, and Jack Schull, among others.

Much of this discussion was devoted to the so-called "classical/balance" controversy, concerning the extent of genetic variation in natural populations and the evolutionary forces controlling it. In important respects, the Macy Conference represents the state of evolutionary genetics prior to the emergence of the neutral theory. Just how the neutral theory altered the terms of the debate has itself been debated. According to Richard Lewontin, the neutral theory was more closely allied to the classical theory, so that the classical/balance controversy gave way to the "neo-classical"/balance debate.

The format of the conference was short individual presentations followed by an informal free-for-all discussion. Fortunately, a stenographer was present throughout the conference to preserve the interactions of these scientists. We have posted the entire transcript, dividing it up by session. This is the first time that it has been available publicly.

We are also in the process of uploading a series of papers on molecular evolution, with many already online. A visitor to our site can already read the two papers that first described the neutral theory: Kimura's 1968 article on "Evolutionary Rates at the Molecular Level;" and King and Jukes' 1969 paper, "Non-Darwian Evolution." Some other foundational papers that we have scanned are Emile Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling's 1965 work on the molecular clock, as well as Richard Lewontin and Jack Hubby's papers on the use of protein electrophoresis to examine the genetic variability of Drosophila (both from 1966). We have also digitized several critiques of the notion that evolution at the molecular level operates under different rules than evolution at the organismal evolution. These works include: G.G. Simpson's "Organisms and Molecules in Evolution" (1964) and Bryan Clarke's "Darwinian Evolution of Proteins" (1970).

In terms of correspondence, we have uploaded a fascinating set of letters between Jack King and Theodosius Dobzhansky from Spring 1970. These three letters, which center around a comment that Dobzhansky made regarding King's belief in "non-Darwinian" evolution at a conference, are truly a joy to read. In addition to the highly detailed scientific minutiae that scientists regularly discuss amongst themselves, one feels a real appreciation for the personal relationship between these two men. In the future, we hope to add much more correspondence from these scientists and many others. We are in the process of developing ways to allow scientists to contribute their unarchived correspondence to us directly.

In our first attempt to generate collaborate content, we have set up a discussion forum on the origins of the neutral theory. We recently sent a letter to every living scientist who cited either Kimura's 1968 or King and Jukes's 1969 paper before 1975 (161 letters in all), asking them to tell us about their initial reactions to the notion that most evolutionary change at the molecular level is selectively neutral. So far we have heard back from several scientists who have either posted their recollections or promised to do so in the near future.

We are also in the early stages of planning our first advisory board meeting to discuss the future direction of the site. (Our board members are: James Crow, John Gillespie, Richard Lewontin, Tomoko Ohta, and William Provine). Some possible events include a series of interviews in which prominent evolutionary and molecular biologists talk to one another about the development of the neutral theory, as well as discussion forums about priority disputes in science and the role of social context in the history of molecular evolution.

In the end, though, it remains to be seen how this experiment in doing history works. Indeed, it may turn out that contemporary scientists have little interest in contributing to histories of their own disciplines. (Judging from the initial response to the first discussion on the molecular evolution site, however, this does not seem to be the case). Whatever the outcome, the project will have achieved a great deal if it helps to facilitate communication between scientists and the people who study them.

During the past year, I used a National Science Foundation fellowship, in part, to locate and study such other Anderson correspondence extant at other libraries. What follows is a report on those efforts. This expansion of materials for my biographical study of Anderson was greatly aided by the generous professionalism of many archivists at institutions around the world. In several cases, their fondness for Anderson, whether long-standing or newly discovered, expedited my requests. On more than one occasion, these librarians would provide a particularly pungent excerpt in their reports to me as they reported putting photocopies in the mail to me or prepared for my visit. Let me publicly reiterate the gratitude I expressed repeatedly in my correspondence with them.

These new materials help fill in important gaps in understanding Anderson's life and career by extending the range of the material in the papers at the Missouri Botanical Garden. In addition to general biographical material, they illuminate the nature of his scientific work, particularly concerning maize, mathematics, and biosystematics.

Among the Anne Roe Papers at the American Philosophical Society Library is a fat folder of Anderson materials she assembled as part of preparing her The Making of a Scientist (1953).³ Anderson was quite forthcoming in two interviews, both the main one in 1948 and a follow up in 1962. He was eager to share reminiscences of growing up and his parents and indeed these interviews are the only major source of information concerning that part of his life. These papers also provide some confirmation of Anderson's mental health problems as Roe corresponded in 1948 with the psychiatrist Anderson saw for anxiety and some related minor psychosomatic complaints. Their exchange is a discussion of their respective interviews with Anderson and interpretation of Rorshach tests Anderson took for Roe. Her 1962 interview took place at a low point for Anderson as he remained fairly drugged after a series of hospitalizations for bipolar disorders. The file also includes admission records for one such incident in 1961 in Connecticut. This evidence is particularly valuable as it indicates that it was only in the late 1950s and early 1960s that Anderson's work was disrupted by these problems.

Also at the APS is Jack Weir's important unpublished manuscript "Genetics and Agriculture at the Bussey Institution of Harvard" which sheds important light on Anderson's graduate school days. Weir appears to have found Anderson an important and voluble source. Additionally, Weir assembled extremely useful material on Anderson's professors and contemporaries and the institution they created, what Anderson called "for a few decades one of the most outstanding graduate schools in the United States."⁴ Weir deposited another copy of his manuscript at the University of Kansas Archives as he spent his career in the Zoology Department there.

Just as several of the Alfred C. Kinsey's biographers have relied on Anderson's reminiscences of graduate school to capture Kinsey at that stage of his life, as Anderson's biographer I am doing the same. Fortunately, there are several letters between them throughout their careers until Kinsey's death in 1956, discussing wasps and supra-specific variation⁵ as much as Kinsey's more famous later research. Of particular interest is a 9-page typescript, "Kinsey as I Knew Him," which Anderson prepared after his friend's death and serves as another source for capturing life at the Bussey Institution.

The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University holds a small but useful packet of letters that sheds light on the "missing years" in Anderson's Missouri Botanical Garden career, the 1931-1935 hiatus when he served as arborist for the Arnold. Of particular interest are the long descriptive letters to Oakes Ames from the Balkans where Anderson collected boxwoods and ivies and met with local botanists. While the postcards he sent to his family are at the Missouri Botanical Garden archives, they are sketchy and presumably he told the family his stories in person. It is in the letters to Ames that a typically Andersonian mélange of observations, both scientific and human, survive.

Wesleyan University holds documentation of the year (1960-1961) Anderson spent there as a visiting fellow, along with composer John Cage (a good amateur mushroom collector evidently) and others, in their Center for Advanced Studies. This was a challenging year for Anderson as he was hospitalized for depression there as the Roe papers indicate, so his work at Wesleyan was curtailed.

Finally, the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation is always a gold mine for scholars working on the history of botany. There, I found several small but interesting collections of letters with Paul Allen, Wilson Popenoe, John M. Fogg, George Sarton (a pleasant surprise), and Mrs. Roy A. Hunt, reflecting Anderson's interests in horticulture and tropical botany.

Perhaps the most important such collection is just one aisle over in the Missouri Botanical Garden archives. The William L. Brown Papers include another full complement of important maize letters beyond the ones already in the Anderson correspondence proper, including an important binder on letters Brown saved between Anderson and Barbara McClintock. Also of great value here are the McClintock/Brown letters which often refer to Anderson and his work.

Brown was Anderson's graduate student and his closest maize collaborator. He spent his career at Pioneer Hi-Bred Corn Company which also supported Anderson's work. Company founder Henry A. Wallace's Papers are at The University of Iowa's Library and are available on microfilm via interlibrary loan and supported by a remarkably thorough finding aid. These letters illuminate yet another side of Anderson's maize project. Anderson knew Wallace first as the president of Pioneer Hi-Bred Corn Company, so maize is a major concern. But, as the correspondence extends into Wallace's political career as Secretary of Agriculture and Vice-President of the United States, even more general agricultural concerns also come to the fore.

The papers of geographer Carl O. Sauer are at the Bancroft Library, University of California-Berkeley. His extensive correspondence with Anderson provides important insights into Anderson's approach to maize. It was with Sauer in 1943 with Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation support that Anderson deepened his corn project. These letters paint a much fuller picture of the nature of their collaboration and the questions they asked about maize. As the chronicle of the easy collaboration between a botanist and a geographer, they help amplify Anderson's characterization of himself as an expert on what was NOT known about corn. As testimony to his appreciation of Sauer, Anderson at least twice wrote letters around the anniversary of their meeting remarking on how much he valued their friendship. There is also a wickedly funny letter from 1943 in which Anderson notes the appointment of E.J. Wellhausen to head up the Rockefeller Foundation's work in Mexico by envisioning himself as a wealthy Mexican able to fund aid workers who might be able to bring his country's insights to impoverished areas of the United States.

The Rockefeller Foundation Archives, nonetheless, holds important records of Anderson's contributions to the efforts they funded for maize improvement in Latin America.

At The Western Historical Manuscripts Collection at the University of Missouri are two collections of particular interest for this project. In the E.G. Anderson papers, I found a useful collection of letters on maize genetics with a frequent collaborator with whom he was sometimes confused. On the other hand, the absence of letters between Anderson and L.J. Stadler who spent his career 125 miles from Anderson in Columbia, Missouri, strikes me as curious, rather as Sherlock Holmes did when the dog did not bark in The Silver Blaze. In 1936 though, Stadler invited both Anderson and R.A. Fisher to come for a visit when Fisher was spending a semester at Ames, Iowa.

Similarly, the Marcus Rhoades papers at the Eli Lilly Library at Indiana University include some letters to and from Anderson. But, again, Rhoades, another renowned maize worker and a collaborator with Anderson's friend Barbara McClintock, was at the University of Illinois, quite close to Anderson, during Anderson's maize years and yet their correspondence is sparse.

The R.A. Fisher papers at The Barr Smith Library at the University of Adelaide holds the letters between Anderson and R.A. Fisher which rather closely chronicles their discussions of Anderson's Iris data, especially in 1936, which Fisher used as the basis for his linear discriminant function⁶. Anderson had first worked with Fisher during his sabbatical in 1929-1930 at the John Innes Horticultural Institute. They continued to correspond into the 1950s and evidently met, together with their mutual friend John W. Tukey, at Princeton in early 1957.

Tukey was another important mathematical collaborator of Anderson's. His relatives have been going through his papers since his death last September. They are generously sending me Anderson materials as they find them in searching Tukey's home and offices both at Princeton and Bell Laboratories. As with the Fisher papers, these letters show how Anderson developed his unique graphical methods for capturing variation. Tukey, who dedicated his Exploratory Data Analysis⁷ to Anderson in part, shared a commitment to finding ways of displaying data that could suggest new ways of interpreting them, rather than merely fitting them into existing theories and theorems.

Anderson had begun this mathematical quest by spending the winter 1933 term with Sewall Wright at the University of Chicago. The Anderson letters in the Wright papers at the American Philosophical Society Library open with a March 1932 letter in which Anderson wonders if one of Wright's formulas can be depicted graphically as Anderson suspects many biologists are like him and think more visually. His term with Wright was a successful introduction to more traditional mathematics. Later in the 1930s, Anderson tested his ideas on genetic linkage on Wright as part of an ongoing discussion that included Wright's April 1949 letter to G. Ledyard Stebbins's on Anderson's Introgressive Hybridization⁸ which is in the Anderson papers.

Kenton L. Chambers¹⁰, professor emeritus at Oregon State University's Department of Botany and Plant Pathology, was a graduate student at Stanford University in the 1950s and took Anderson's "Genetics and Natural History" seminar there while Anderson was a visiting professor. He has graciously made those class notes (as well as those from his seminar with Richard Goldschmidt another semester) available to me. A bit of Anderson's style as a teacher comes through from reading these notes as does a strong sense how his various interests-hybridization, domesticated plants, and natural history-can be understood in terms of biosystematics.

Though not extensive, the Carnegie Institution of Washington papers housed at the Missouri Botanical Garden include a number of valuable letters between Anderson and Jens Clausen in particular. These papers themselves are a rich resource yet to be plumbed fully. The production of a finding aid underway now by Garden volunteers will soon begin to give a sense of their scope.

Perhaps the most interesting material regarding biosystematics are Camp's papers concerning his landmark 1943 paper with Charles Gilly on "The Structure and Origin of Species." Anderson returned an extensively notated copy that reflected his encouragement and suggestions, as he enthusiastically scribbled in response to their neologism "biosystematy" "which was the point of letters I wrote you a year ago about the no-mans land (biosystematy) between genetics and hayloft taxonomy. In subsequent letters, Anderson basically rewrote their section on "alloploidions." He also briefly explored collaborating with them as he worked on completing (as he never did) a manuscript based on his 1941 Jesup Lectures on "Systematics and the Origin of Species: From the Viewpoint of a Botanist." These letters are but the second mention I have found of that erstwhile manuscript. Anderson reported having about 100 pages of manuscript on March 20, 1942, even as Mayr's book was going to press and proposed contacting Theodosius Dobzhansky and his editors at Columbia University Press seeking approval for this collaboration. They evidently did okay Anderson's idea but Anderson himself had come to the conclusion four months later that, though complementary, their efforts were meant for different audiences. In any case, the Camp and C.H. Gilly paper, "The Structure and Origin of Species," ¹¹ now deserves attention as reflecting in part some of Anderson's views on biosystematics and the origin of species.

Taken together, these new materials add to the resources available to understand this unique figure in 20th Century evolutionary biology. They render, in the form of the video, the very man more intelligible as well as clarifying details of his life and career. Importantly, his science, especially his defining work on maize, mathematics, and biosystematics, stands out more clearly.

The Goad Papers are a small (6 linear feet) collection of correspondence, manuscripts and notes relating to the founding and early operation of GenBank and the Human Genome Project, including some detailed information on the design, construction, and (for lack of a better term) business plan. The Papers are fully processed and are currently open for research. The finding aid is available on the APS website at http://www.amphilsoc.org/library/mole/g/goad.htm.

Late in the year, the APS experienced a revisitation from Leon Whitney, former field secretary for the American Eugenics Society. Deep in the bowels of the library, a photograph album was rediscovered, containing approximately 200 photographs and half-tone illustrations of institutions for the "feeble-minded" in New York State, 1917-1925. The album appears to have been assembled to document the range of facilities for the care of mental patients and, like much of the material in the AES collection, to render their efforts visible to the public. The photographs appear primarily to have been provided to Whitney by the institutions themselves, and consist mostly of external views of buildings and grounds, a smaller number of interior views, and, in several cases, formally posed images of staff and patients at work. The images emphasize the remarkable orderliness of the institutions, architecturally and behaviorally, and they are accompanied (oddly enough) by eighteen photographs of posters issued by the New York Police Department as part of an anti-crime publicity campaign, and a similar number of scenic views marked "In the Ozark Mountains."

Finally, what comes around, comes around. Although the world of paleontology falls relatively far afield from genetics, paleontologists think a great deal about periodicity and the impact of genetics in evolutionary time, and few have done so more intently than Jack Sepkoski, whose papers recently arrived at the APS. A Harvard-educated paleontologist from the University of Chicago, Sepkoski exerted an enormous influence upon his field during the late 1970s and 1980s, becoming one of the principal exponents of the paleobiological renaissance and a promethean figure in introducing computer modeling to his peers. He is best known for attempting to model the shape of organismic diversity through time, an on-going project that resulted in the discovery in about 1980 of a statistically significant periodicity to mass extinction events. According to Sepkoski's analyses, every 26-30 million years the earth experiences an episode in which 65 to95% of its biota is killed off, a dramatic finding that reoriented paleontologists from conceiving of mass extinction events in isolation into searching for a common, periodic cause. Sepkoski's work has subsequently cross-fertilized with everything from theories about the extra-terrestrial causes of extinction (the "asteroid theory") to theories considering the interaction between causal and acausal factors in shaping the earth's evolutionary history. The Sepkoski Papers are a nearly complete record of Sepkoski's brief, but extraordinarily productive career, and should be available to research beginning in the summer. Like Capistrano, they should merit repeated revisitation.

There is no special application form and this notice provides all the essential information needed to apply. Applicants should submit the following: (1) cover sheet stating a) name, b) title of project, c) expected period of residence, d) institutional affiliation, e) mailing address, f) telephone numbers, and g) social security number; (2) a letter (not to exceed three single-spaced pages) which briefly describes the project and how it relates to existing scholarship, states the specific relevance of the American Philosophical Society's collections to the project, and indicates expected results of the research (such as publications); (3) a c.v. or resume; and (4) one letter of reference (doctoral candidates' must use their dissertation advisor). Guides to the collections are available on the Society's website: http://www.amphilsoc.org. Applicants are strongly encouraged to consult the Library staff by mail or phone regarding the collections.