Reply to H. V. Wyatt

@article{Lederberg1972ReplyTH,
  title={Reply to H. V. Wyatt},
  author={Joshua Lederberg},
  journal={Nature},
  year={1972},
  volume={239},
  pages={234-234}
}
WYATT's inference1 that Avery's work on pneumococcal transformation was not well recognized by geneticists in the decade following his 1944 report2 is somewhat at odds with my own recollection and experience. If we sometimes omitted a specific citation to the original work, this is testimony to his name (like Mendel's) having already become a household word, too familiar to require routine attribution. A more useful reference might be a later review. 
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21 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
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Background Citations
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21 Citations

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The theme for this review is that efforts to account for the pathophysiology of the thalassemias appear to be converging on a common question: what determines the rate of production of a given gene product in differentiated cells of a eukaryote of a man.
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It is asserted that citation data are not merely flawed in one or another respect but that they are so incomplete and so biased, in principle, that they should not be used in empirical studies of intellectual influence.
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References

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Experimental fragments relating to a situation in the bacterium Escherichia coli, which may be similar in some respects, are described, and the facility and certainty with which these characters may be detected readily are noted.
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In delivering a lecture course on microbial genetics Dr. Lederberg found that in most universities the papers he recommended for supplementary reading were represented only by single copies of the…
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In the course of the examination of sputum from cases of lobar pneumonia, observations have been made on the incidence of the chief types of pneumococci, and the antigens of certain Group IV strains appear to be closely related to that of Type II.
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This paper will be devoted to the presentation of evidence for the occurrence in a bacterium of a process of gene recombination, from which the existence of a sexual stage may be inferred.
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ANALYSIS of mixed cultures of nutritional mutants has revealed the presence of new types which strongly suggest the occurrence of a sexual process in the bacterium, Escherichia coli.
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