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PART II. GUIDELINES/REGULATIONS OF RECOMBINANT DNA TECHNOLOGY 
A. Historical Perspective 
The United States government was first officially 
alerted to the potential promise and potential hazards of rDNA 
technology in 1971 by Dr. James Watson before the House science 
and Astronautics Committee (now the Science and Technology 
Committee). In 1973, during the Gordon Conference on Nucleic 
Acids in New England, a group of scientists led by Dieter Soil of. 
Yale University, Maxine Singer of the National Cancer Institute, 
and others, indicated their concern about the potential for a 
public health hazard from certain types of research involving 
recombinant DNA molecules. This concern was based upon the 
realization that the ability to use the newly available 
restriction and ligating enzymes to cut and recombine the DNA 
from different species might, in certain types of experiments 
(such as those involving particularly pathogenic cells or viruses 
associated with cancer), accidentally produce a recombinant DNA 
which would code for characteristics that could be hazardous. 
For example, it was speculated that an inadvertent modification 
of its DNA might enhance the capability of a seemingly harmless 
organism so that the altered organism would produce cancer or a 
highly infectious disease if accidentally or unknowingly 
released into the environment. 
As a result of the concerns expressed by the scientific 
community, an international meeting was held at Asilomar, 
California in 1975 and attended by a group of eminent scientists 
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