Document Do8nvMrqRGYYkeXa81gOq81N

March 11, Dr. K. N. Bagchi Ofrice of Chemical Examiner to the Government, Bengal Medical College Calcutta, India Dear Doctor Bagchi:- No doubt you think me very remiss in not writing to you sooner, and you are entirely justified. Actually your recent letter arrived in my absence from the country and I have only recently had a chance to clean up my accumulated correspondence. Your reprint of the article in the January 19i+0 number of the Indian Journal of Medical Research came in and was filed with some other articles for later study without my seeing It at once, since I was working at that time on some other material. Bnfor tunat ely that happens to; reprints rather frequently, unless they are concerned with matters under immediate study at the time of their receipt. I am very greatly interested in your work. If your ideas are correct, they are of very great physiological importance. I am still some what unconvinced that the explanation given of your high results la correct. I do not doubt the source of the lead found, and I do not doubt the analytical data, but I question the adequacy of your methods or any other to remove the lead from th surface of in dividual hairs. Your methods of cleaning certainly sounds good, at least for most materials, but in order to demonstrate their adequacy, it would seem that you should first determine the lead content of the hair, then contaminate It with external lead to a degree determined by subsequent analyses, and thbn decontaminate it to the original lead concentration by the use of your cleaning methods. This mfty sound like excessive zeal in the criticism of your results, but I think it is not, in view of the importance of the problem, and in view of the rather far-reaching conclusions drawn from your data. K 0019858 2- * `.There are many points of your work that are of specific interest to me, and many problems that are opened up for discussion. I do not overlook these points in- making the tentative suggestion above, andI am grateful to you for sending me the articles and for your interest in my point of view concerning them. In return I am sending three articles that may prove to be of interest to you. I shall look into the question of the hair in some of our work, and see what I can report to you on that score. With kindest regards. Sincerely, -RAK: i s Robert A. Kehoe, M.D. KE 0019859