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One commentator held that the Draft EIS, instead of being limited 
to NIH, should have been a statement drafted by NIH as a lead agency 
for all Federal agencies [20]. This suggestion erroneously assumes 
that there is a broad government recombinant DNA research program. 
At present, among Federal agencies, only the National Science Foundation 
and the Department of Agriculture, in addition to NIH, have grants 
or contracts in recombinant DNA research. As of August 1977 NSF 
was supporting 65 projects that included recombinant DNA research 
in whole or in part. The Department of Agriculture, together with 
the Cooperative State Research Service, was supporting approximately 
50 such projects, and Agriculture’s Research Service had four. 
Although no other Federal agencies are supporting recombinant 
DNA research, all those represented on the Federal Interagency 
Committee (see Appendix I) have endorsed the NIH Guidelines. 
The NIH Environmental Impact Statement may serve, if appropriate, 
for other agencies. All Federal research agencies were sent copies 
of the Draft EIS for comment and will be sent a copy of this Final 
EIS. 
II. AUTHORITY 
No significant issues were raised concerning this section of the 
Draft EIS. 
III. OBJECTIVE OF THE NIH ACTION 
See discussion of the "major Federal action" in Section I of this 
appendix. 
IV. BACKGROUND 
A number of issues were raised by commentators in this section 
of the Draft EIS. 
A. Description of the Recombinant DNA Experimental Process 
In response to the requests by some commentators, additional 
descriptions and references concerning the natural biological processes 
of recombination and transformation have been added to this Section 
[20,26], New material was included to make clear that recombinant 
DNA technology is a tool that can be applied to diverse areas of 
biological research. 
