BACTERIAL PHYSIOLOGY UNIT 
HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL 
Bernard D. Davis. M.D. 
Adele Lehman Professor 
of Bacterial Physiology 
December 28, 1979 
Boston, Massachusetts 02ttS 
Telephone, < * > 7 
732-2022 
Dr. Donald Fredrickson, Director 
National Institutes of Health 
Bethesda, Maryland 20205 
Dear Don: 
As you know, I have believed from the start that the hypo- 
thetical dangers from recombinant DNA were greatly exaggerated, 
and I feared that the expensive and time-consuming procedures in- 
troduced for regulating this research might stay with us, like 
some "temporary" buildings in Washington, for many years to come. 
I would therefore like to commend you, and the RAC, for relaxing 
the guidelines so rapidly in response to the accumulating evidence. 
In the light of the information that you have summarized 
in section III-B of the Federal Register of November 30, 1979, 
I see no possibility that experiments with E. coli K12 (excepting 
insertion of certain particularly dangerous genes) pose any con- 
ceivably significant threat to the health of individuals or the 
community, or to the quality of the environment. I would, there- 
fore, support the recommendation of Dr. Wallace Rowe that these 
experiments be completely exempted from the Guidelines. I am 
sorry that you consider this degree of relaxation too much for 
the present, and that you recommend certain continued restrictions 
(though mild ones), and registration with the local IBC. However, 
I recognize that you may be responding realistically to conflicting 
pressures. I would only emphasize the value of proceeding further 
as rapidly as possible in eliminating restrictions that are seen by 
the bulk of the concerned and knowledgeable scientific community 
as useless and burdensome. As you stated so well on page 69,243, 
"In the end unrealistic restrictions will frustrate the general 
maintenance of necessary and reasonable precautions. " 
You may be interested to know that in the forthcoming third 
edition of "Microbiology", which I am co-authoring with Renato 
Dulbecco, Herman Eisen, and Harold Ginsberg, it has seemed advis- 
able, in a new chapter on Plasmids and Gene Manipulation, to include 
a short section on scientific aspects of the regulation problem 
(enclosed) . This statement has been approved by my three co-authors. 
[ 618 ] 
