20 
disapproval, recommended modifications, or conditional approval, of such 
research proposals." In addition, the Guidelines should state that no such 
recombinant DNA research proposal will be funded by the National Institutes 
of Health unless it has been approved by the institutional biohazards 
committee. 
In expressing these concerns, I am pleased to note that Senator Adlai 
E. Stevenson, who is chair of the Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and 
Space, and has conducted hearings an recombinant DNA research, agrees with this 
position. In a personal communication to me (June 1, 1978), he notes that 
local discretion in enforcement is necessary, and goes on to say "moreover, 
I assume that institutional committees will retain even broader authority 
to approve and disapprove projects or to attach conditions to their conduct." 
I urge the NIH to modify the Guidelines accordingly. 
As example of the kinds of policy which the University of Washington 
IBC has used in the past, let me offer the following: the imposition of 
a moritorium on considering P-3 level research proposals (for approximately 
18 months) in order to assure that researchers in relevant areas, members 
of the IBC, biohazards safety personnel, and the general public could build 
up sufficient experience with less risky forms of experimentation in order 
to have the capabilities to reasonably assess, perform, and monitor more 
risky experiments; conditioning our approval of a particular experiment on 
the requirement that the researcher perform certain intermediate tests on the 
mutant E-coli produced in the experiment and report back to the committee if 
certain indicators were present; conditioning the approval of proposals 
involving the use of virulence genes to require that they be split in ways 
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