November 10, 197^ 
Document 27 
Dr. Donald Frederickson 
Director NIH 
Dear Dr. Frederickson* 
Thank-you for this opportunity to respond to the Draft 
Environmental Impact statement on the NIH DNA research 
guidelines. My name is Mark DesCamp and I am currently 
a junior in Chemical Engineering at the University of 
Michigan. I feel that the outcome of this issue will 
have a very great effect on the general public and thus 
I would like to present my views. 
In the first place, I would like to examine one of the 
questions asked in a statement by the Advisory Committee. 
That question was whether "the guidelines balance scien- 
tific responsibility to the public with scientific 
freedom to pursue new knowledge." The question of "bal- 
ancing" suggests a compromise between the two. In my view, 
this is a very dangerous position. With a process that 
has such a high level of possible risks, the primary 
concern has to be the safety of the public, it cannot be 
compromised with other considerations. 
When the moratorium was called for in June of 197^, it 
was proposed to last "until the potential hazards of such 
recombinant DNA molecules have been better evaluated or 
until adequate methods are developed for preventing their 
spread." From all that I have been able to discover, 
neither of these conditions have been adequately met, and 
yet the research is now taking place with the only con- 
straints being the NIH guidelines, which have no more 
authority than that of public censure. 
The first condition, to better assess the dangers of the 
process, has supposedly been taken care of by the class- 
ification of the various experiments according to their 
projected risks. I must confess I am at a loss to dis- 
cover how a measure of the risks could be made when an 
extensive body of data on all of the combinations re- 
sulting in these experiments is non-existent. To 
extrapolate results of a new process on the bases of 
Appendix K — 154 
