August 29, 1962
Dr. Hewson Swift
Department of Zoology
The University of Chicago
Chicago 37, Illinois
Dear Hew:
Thank you for consulting me about the questions that you raised in your
letter of August 10. I started to frame a specific reply and then realized
I might be able to save time for similar occasions in the future by writing
it up in more general terms, so I have done this in the form of the enclosed
sheet entitled "Addendum to SCITEL". Also enclosed is the SCITEL proposal
and a page or two of some other notes I have written on the information prob-
lem from time to time.
If there is an opportunity to do some bold experimentation in scientific
communication, I hope you will take advantage of it - I was glad to notice
your own sensitivity about "complicating the biological literature with yet
another journal".
At the foot of "Miniscitel" I refer to the probable necessity of subcontracting
the managerial work of such an experiment. I am doing all that I can to push
the recognition of this as a governmental responsibility, and perhaps some
year we may have some real help in that direction. Meanwhile, the AIBS and
even Biological Abstracts seem to me very feeble indeed, and I have been chan-
neling some of my own effort through Gene Garfield's company, the Institute
for Scientific Information (which you may know as Current Contents) as one of
the more imaginative and energetic activities in biological documentation.
Handling the "Miniscitel" for cell biology is perhaps a little out of the usual
line for Garfield, but he does have all the basic resources for it, and I
would be glad to add my own persuasion to urging him to consider a proposal
from you, if that were the direction you decided to take.
You might note that the physicists have a system somewhat analogous to a
repository in the way they handle Physical Review and Physical Review letters.
You asked about our video spectrometry system. A couple of weeks ago we
turned on the video sensing and ratio analysis segment. This compares video
lines from any two specified points on the target plate, delays one with
respect to the other so that they can be superimposed, logs each channel, and
displays the difference as the log of the ratio between the two video lines.
It actually works! So we are using this as a double beam ratio recording
spectrophotometer by projecting spectra onto the target plate, half the field
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