266 
the events at Asilomar before a meeting of the generally staid NIH Institute 
Directors and I believe I was able to transfer to them some of my excitement. 
Over the succeeding months, the Recombinant DNA Molecule Program Ad- 
visory Ck)mmittee met and, by July 1975, it drafted a set of guidelines at 
Woods Hole, Massachusetts, which I at the time thought to be reasonably satis- 
factory. They did not conform to my prior notion of guidelines exactly, since 
they bordered on the encyclopedic. Nonetheless, I felt that we had successfully 
compromised most of the burning issues over which the Committee was initial- 
ly strongly divided. When these guidelines were distributed, however, they 
elicited vigorous and often emotional responses, and among these responses 
there was one which I recall vividly. It charged our Committee with having 
violated the “spirit of Asilomar.” At the time this expression did not catch my 
attention, but on consideration I was struck by the fact that despite the many, 
many meetings which I had attended at Atlantic City, I had never heard a 
reference to the “spirit of Atlantic City.” This charge, in fact, pinpointed for 
me the notion that the experience at Asilomar was essentially a spiritual one 
rather than an intellectual one. It was, in the usual sense, not a scientific 
meeting at all. Whatever its purpose may have been in the minds of its initiators, 
a result was to fire the imagination, first, of the newspaper correspondents 
^o were abundantly represented, and then of a substantial segment of the 
newspaper-reading public. 
By December 1975, our Committee, meeting at La Jolla, t^ain assembled a 
set of guidelines. Whereas up to that time I had insufficient confidence in my 
own judgment to hold a firm opinion on this issue, and found myself swayed 
by the views most recently presented, it was about the time of the La Jolla 
meeting that I began to wonder whether, indeed, any of the postulated hazards 
of recombinant DNA molecule technology were likely to materialize. 
The La Jolla guidelines served as the basis for a discussion at a meeting of 
the NIH Director’s Advisory Committee early in 1976, and this, in turn, was 
followed in July by the publication of the official NIH guidelines. In this last 
transformation, something happened which I found disturbing. 
The mission of NIH is, I believe, very simply stated. It is to conduct and to 
support the very best biomedical research that it can find to conduct and 
support. Similarly, the mission of our Committee and of the guidelines which 
it drafted was to provide assurance that research in the area of recombinant 
DNA molecules would be conducted in such a fashion as not to jeopardize the 
laboratory, the commimity, or the environment. Both missions, it should be 
noted, are stated positively. It is the purpose both of NIH and of this Commit- 
tee to encourage, to promote — not to forbid or to impede. The legal profession 
represented at the Director’s Advisory Committee meeting was critical of 
the concept of guidelines, which in my judgement are designed to provide 
guidance to the investigator and to those who review his proposal. We were 
informed that what was needed was regulation, not guidance. This was exem- 
plified by the recommendation that our instruction, written largely in the 
subjunctive mood (the investigator should . . .) be replaced by the more 
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