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COMMENTS ON THE PUBLIC NOTICE 50 FED. REG. 14794 
(1985) AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT, ETC. 
NIH Office of Recombinant DNA Activities (ORDA) 
Building 31, Room 3B10 
National Institutes of Health 
Bethesda, Maryland 20205 
These comments are submitted on behalf of the 
Foundation on Economic Trends, Inc., and the other 
plaintiffs in Foundation o n Economic Trends v . Heckler , 
No. 83-2714, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia, 
in response to the public notice issued by the National 
Institutes of Health ("NIH"), 50 Fed. Reg. 14794 (April 
15, 1985), and on the environmental assessment ("EA") 
and on the finding of no significant impact ("FONSI") 
referred to in the notice. 
As a preliminary matter, we wish to point out a 
significant omission in the notice in its description 
of the opinion of the Court of Appeals in FET v . 
Heckler . The court of appeals agreed with the district 
court that the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) 
applies to the deliberate release experiments, the 
court stating "that if NIH fails to give appropriate 
environmental consideration to any other experiment, as 
it has failed to do with the University of California 
experiment, injunctive relief would be clearly proper." 
Slip op. at 4; see also Slip op. at 31. 
The difficulty with the notice on this point is 
that it is consistent with -- and therefore could be 
erroneously construed to mean -- that the court held 
only that NEPA applies to the University of California 
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