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Question 8: 
An experiment at the University of California San Francisco Medical 
Center was destroyed by high-temperature sterilization in March 1977 
because the test was in violation of standards set up by the Federal 
government to insure the public's safety from recombinant DNA 
research. 
In the September 1978 issue of The Sciences published by the New 
York Academy of Sciences an article by Boyce Rensberger entitled 
"What Makes Science News?" page ten states, "At The Times, we once 
ran a story about Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare degenerative 
disease of the central nervous system that is believed to be caused 
by a virus. It had been found that surgical instruments that touched 
the brains of victims could pick up the virus, which was not killed 
by conventional sterilization methods , and transmit it to the brians 
of others, who then came down with the invariably fatal disease." 
Is it possible that recombinant DNA technology could create an agent 
nr carrier that was not killed by conventional sterilization methods? 
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Question 9: 
The two major recombinant DNA researchers at the University of 
California San Francisco Medical Center did not tell the truth at a 
press confrerence on May 23 » 1977 that their research was carried 
out within the safety procedures established by the National 
Institutes of Health. In fact, the researchers Dr. Howard M. Goodman, 
Professor of Biochemistry, and Dr. William J. Rutter, Chairman of the 
Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, had violated the safety 
procedures just three months before (documented in Science September 
30, 1977). 
This clear deception on the part of these researchers is 
documented in the following newspaper articles: San Francisco Chronicle 
May 24 and September 27, 1977 by Science Correspondent David Perlman, 
and San Francisco Examiner May 24 and September 27, 1977 by Science 
Writer Walter Barney. 
How will the proposed new guidelines deal with a situation like 
this? What if any sanctions will be taken against researchers who 
knowingly mislead and/or deceive the public? 
I' 
Question 10: 
I am enclosing a leaflet I wrote in October 1977 on the subject of 
recombinant DNA research at the University of California San Francisco 
Medical Center. Albert R. Jonsen, Vice-Chairman (November 1976) of the 
institutional Biosafety Committee on the San Francisco campus of the 
University of California, called this leaflet "a tissue of falsehoods." 
The information on the leaflet was primarily obtained from the New 
York Times, Science and Smithsonian magazine. 
What are the factual errors on this leaflet so I may stand corrected? 
This incident is particularly relevant to the new proposed guidelines 
because it involves the honesty of researchers and the responsibility 
and credibility of the Biosafety Committee that was suppose to over- 
