34 
MINUTES OF MEETING - June 5-6 1 
XXIV. VALEDICTORY STATEMENT OF THE RETIRING CHAIRPERSON 
Dr. Setlow delivered to the RAC the following impressions of her tenure 
as chairperson: 
I 
"About two and one-half years ago, the previous chairman, Hans 
Stetten talked to me about the job. He said the job itself is 
awful, but you have one benefit which is that you get to meet 
some interesting people. I would agree with the second thing, 
but he did not adequately warn me about the first. For example, 
I had no idea that RAC deliberations would end up being positively 
impolite at times. So, it turned out the only previous experience 
that prepared me for any of this was raising four fractious young. 
As all of you know by this time, I have developed in the last years i 
a passionate interest in the elimination of restrictions for most 
recombinant ENA work. This passionate interest, I think, was shared 
by my predecessor, Hans Stetten, as you all know because you probably 
read his beautiful valedictory speech in "Gene." We have ccme a 
tremendous way during the last two years. For example, it is a 
source of tremendous satisfaction to me that recombinant molecules 
are no longer considered to be highly dangerous entities and that 
means that we, as a committee, have totally abandoned the idea of 
requiring all human sex to go on in P4 facilities. 
I 
Having attended every meeting of this Committee since the very 
beginning, I am good and ready to say goodbye, as many of you know, 
and I want to thank all of you who have worked extraordinarily long 
hours to do the chores of this Committee. 
I want to say a word about how enormously happy I am about who the 
new chairman is. I found him to be a fantastically wonderful mixture 
of the following: competence, affability, polite ferocity and humor. 
All of these attributes will mean that he will be well able to deal 
with the awful parts of the new job. 
In finishing my remarks, I want to draw your attention to the person 
who I think is the unsung hero of recombinant ENA and he has been, 
for a number of years, subjected to endless battering from above, 
belcw, and sideways. Scientists, distinguished and otherwise, have 
had the habit of calling him on the telephone and telling him he is 
a miserable bureaucratic worm. Will you all please remember that 
Bill Gartland has been endlessly helpful even during the process of 
gradual destruction of his own job by the RAC. Thus, I want to pay 
tribute to Bill Gartland and to his extremely competent ORDA staff, 
Stanley Barban and Elizabeth Milewski, and that perfect paragon of 
efficiency, Betty Butler, and her cohorts, Becky Connors and Trisha 
Stein, and I want to thank them all." 
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