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Professor Bruce Ames
Department of Biochemistry
University of California
Berkeley, CA  94720
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Dear Bruce:

	Thanks for your hospitality yesterday, and give my regards
to your wife.

	Enclosed is last year's Class II proposed resolution.  I
didn't see it until I read the minutes of last year's N.A.S.
meeting after I had talked to Frank Press on the subject of the
academies of science being a force for rationality in the face of
the environmentalist bandwagons.  This suggests that N.A.S.  has
a certain tendency to be a force for irrationality.  However, I
guess the resolution didn't get out, and I'll try to find out
what happened when I see someone I can ask.

	The point is that I still think that the scientific
community is the key one to influence.  Once that community
realizes its responsibility for rationality, I think the
media, Congress and the public will be more readily influenced.
The trouble is that scientists, like other people, like to
be regarded as good guys and thus tend to go along with
intellectual fads unless they are pressed by their colleagues.

	I'm still mulling over what might be done.

	Since I will be in Berkeley again Friday, I called
Art Rosenfeld and will have attended his seminar and talked
with him.  The LBL material you gave me left me undecided
about whether he is a force for rationality.  I fear that
the alliances and discretion required to get utility
regulators to support his pricing scheme may have inhibited
his objectivity, or at least public expression of it.

	I have two questions for you, but the answers can
wait until we talk again.

\item{1.}  Has your work on pesticides been formally criticized
by the other side or are they trying to get by with ignoring it?
References?

\item{2.}  What happens if you back off from the MTD by a factor
of 2 or 10?  Does the cancer rate go down more than linearly?

	Finally, Philip Siegelman will send you material on
the National Association of Scholars and the California
Association of Scholars.  As I mentioned, your friend Aaron
Wildavsky recently agreed to be the first State Chairman.

\closing
Best Regards,
John McCarthy
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