Document 2 
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY 
^ASAOKNA. CALIFORNIA OtiaS 
DIVISION OF StOLOOY 180-as 
September 7* 1976 
Dr. Donald S. Fredrickson 
Office of the Director 
National Institutes of Health 
Bethesda, Maryland 200114- 
Dear Don: 
I hare read with considerable interest the draft of the Environmental Impact 
Statement on the rules of the NIH "Guidelines for Research Involving Recombinant 
DNA Molecules." Let me say first that it is an exceptionally well written and 
lucid document; it has atten5>ted, in my opinion, to provide a fairly complete 
catalog of the potential benefits and hazards of the recombinant DNA technology 
and to present these in an objective manner. 
I would, however, take issue with a few of the conclusions or Judgments made. 
In particular I refer to Section C la (pp. l8-20) to which frequent reference 
is made subsequently in the text. 
I would agree that in the visual parlance organisms sure generally "well adapted" 
relative to their competitors in their present ecological niches — that is, 
their adaptation is as good as they have been able to achieve in the evolutionary 
time available to them and by the mechanisms (principally single mutations and 
genetic recombinations, within species) available to them. Therefore, it is 
probably unlikely that any single mutation will markedly improve their fitness 
or expand their ecological range. However, conversely I see no reason to 
believe that the evolutionary process has at any given time exhausted the possi- 
bilities latent in the existing mechanisms. Furthermore, we certainly could 
say the same when another novel evolutionary route is opened to such organisms 
through the sudden addition of large pieces of genome of a character not normally 
available to them. 
Indeed, I would think it unlikely that Nature will not take advantage of the new 
evolutionary potentials thus provided to produce better adapted orgeinisms of 
wider ecological range. 
On another topic relative to the rather brief discussion of possible deliberate 
misuse on p. 31, I feel the treatment is unduly sanguine. While it is true 
(I hope) that no one has produced intentionally hazardous agents, I know of no 
scientists in the recombinant DNA field who do not believe that such agents 
most likely could be produced. 
Appendix K — 6 
