Page 30 of Attachment E 
against the backdrop of our chancy world, could seriously cripple 
science, the principal tool our civilization has fashioned to mitigate the 
condition of man ...” 
The above and many other similar documents refer to: 
(3) The NIH-Sponsored “Falmouth Workshop” of June 20-21, 
1977 (see Section IV). 
The proceedings of this meeting are expected to be published in the 
May 1978 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases. 
Additional relevant information was presented at: 
(4) The Lorenzini-WHO-Sponsored “Symposium on Genetic 
Engineering” (March 29-31, 1978). 
This meeting was attended by all three members of our Working 
Group. The Proceedings will be published by Elsevier-North Holland in 
late 1978. Among the many interesting scientific presentations, par- 
ticipants learned of still another group’s success in detecting ex- 
pression of eukaryotic genes (Neurospora; S.R. Kushner et al., Univ. of 
Georgia, USA) in E. coli bacteria and the perhaps surprising lack of 
successs on the part of two other groups in attempts to detect ex- 
pression of E. coli genes introduced into another prokaryote, B. subtilis 
(W. Goebel, el al., Univ. of Wurzburg, Germany; S.D. Ehrlich et al., Univ. 
of Paris, France). This prompted J. Tooze (EMBO) and others to question 
the logic of many guidelines in which the level of containment is 
determined on the basis of phylogenetic relatedness. 
The development of an efficient transformation system for yeast was 
another report of great interest. Dr. J. Fink (Cornell Univ., USA) 
presented evidence that DNA can be readily taken up by these 
organisms, and an individual segment can be inserted in many locations 
in the yeast genome. Bacterial plasmid DNA is inserted along with the 
yeast genes, a finding which challenges the existence of the 
hypothetical barrier to DNA exchange between prokaryotes and 
eukaryotes. Dr. A Rdrsch (University of Leiden, Netherlands) sum- 
marized results from his and other groups on the transfer of plasmid 
DNA from the bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens to plants, a 
second example of prokaryotic-eukaryotic DNA exchange. He 
discussed ways in which the plasmid may be used as a recombinant 
DNA vector in plant cells. 
In another series of reports, participants learned from the groups of 
Tonegawa (Basel Institute, Switzerland) Chambon (CNRS, France) and 
Kourilsky (Pasteur Institute, France) that eukaryotic genes for dif- 
ferentiated function (immunoglobin and ovalbumin) are interrupted by 
many non-gene spacer regions which are later removed during for- 
mation of mature messenger RNA. As far as is known, prokaryotes 
possess no analogous mechanism for RNA processing. Thus, it seems 
probable that many genomic eukaryotic DNA sequences may not be 
expressed in E. coli or in other prokaryotic hosts. 
Dr. H. Boyer (U. of Calif., USA) summarized his and his colleagues 
work (see bibliography) leading to the synthesis and cloning of a 
“synthetic” gene for the brain hormone somatostatin. The hormone is 
safely synthesized in bacteria as a non-functional protein and can be 
released later in a contained in vitro chemical reaction. 
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