Statement at HEW Public Hearing on Recombinant DNA Guidelines Revisions 
Barbara H. Rosenberg, Ph D, Associate Member, Sloan-Kettering Institute and 
Associate Professor, Biochemistry, Cornell Univ. Medical College 
Grace Ungers, M.S. .Research Assistant, Sloan-Kettering Institute 
The use of Recombinant DNA could potentially alter man and his 
environment, for better or worse, by intention or accidentally. Therein 
lies both the promise and the danger of this new technology. 
The NIH Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee and the guidelines were 
set ,!;p to minimize the hazards that might arise accidentally from various 
small-scale experimental procedures envisaged in current biological 
research, mainly academic research. It was academic research that gace birth to 
Recombinant DNA techniques; and the academic research community, primarily 
under the aegis of the NIH, has been the first to exploit the techniques 
as well as to recognize their possible risks. But the recent syntheses 
rapid 
of somatostatin and insulin and the/emergence of industrial interest show 
that academic research will not have the field to itself for much longer. 
New problems are about to arise, resulting from the near impossibility of 
when they are 
preventing the escape of recombinant organisms /produced on a large scale 
problems also that may result fro 
for drug manufacture; A of predicting al 1 the environmental consequences A 
the intentional release of large quantities of genetically-engineered 
organisms such as oil-eating bacteria or nitrogen-fixing plants. But the 
regulation of industrial applications is outside the scope of the NIH, 
and evaluation of the public stakes in the application of this new 
technology is bsyond the competence of the research biologists who make 
up most of the membership of the advisory committee. Societal priorities, 
ethical questions, and nonscientific judgements are going to be involved, 
and if the authority is not broadened and the decisions are not very soon 
delegated to a more qualified and representative body, they are going to 
Experience shows that 
be made, de facto, by commercial interests alone. / commercial decisions 
have a way of becoming economic necessities that are independent of their 
intrinsic value - witness the difficulties of phasing out the manufacture 
and use of carcinogenic insecticides like Mirex and chlordane or of nitrite 
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