Fredrickson 23 Sept 78 
- 3 - 
eager beavers who want to do do this work today are also capable of 
making mistakes too. What about the Salk vaccine? After millions 
and millions of people were inoculated - including some in this 
audience - only later was it discovered that the Salk vaccine had 
been contaminated with a foreign virus, SV40. Fortunately, SV40 is 
not immediately lethal - it only produces cancers in animals - 
not yet in man. But under the Delaney amendement, it is against 
the law, against FDA regulations, to administer such carcinogens!" 
I do not want you to draw the conclusion that I am anti-scientist 
or anti-experiments or even anti-acquisition of new knowledge. I am 
Clinical Professor of Anesthesia at Stanford University. I have been for 
many years a member of the American Physiological Society, the 
American Society of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, Sigma Xi , etc. 
But what I am saying is that, given the role of mistakes in other - 
and in this case - closely related science, it behooves you to proceed 
with utmost diligence. I know the arguments of Berg et al that their 
past record indicates that that is in fact their position. I disagree - 
in the sense that extreme care at one point in history is no license to 
proceed at a less careful pace at another point in history. The 
revised guidelines should reflect such extreme diligence. 
2. IGNORANCE 
Even the most well-intentioned people work in science without 
full knowledge of the entire situation, including its hazards - not 
because they choose to ignore those hazards or because they are knaves 
and do so deliberately. Often the knowledge simply does not exist at 
that given point in time. In February 1977 I stated: 
"Then there is the danger of ignorance. Let us look at the 
Curies. Madam Marie Curie, twice a Nobel laureate. Irene Jol iot-Curie, 
her daughter and a noted scientist in her own right, and then her 
son-in-law, the incomparable Frederic Jol iot-Curie. These 3 people 
were certainly not stupid or foolish - by any standard. Yet they 
died of leukemia - because at the time of their exposure no one 
appreciated the biological dangers of radiation. Along similar 
lines and presaging the next point I will be making - I must consider 
the ethical and moral Question of Stanford hiring people to work in 
the DNA labs. In this connection I can not set aside the memories 
burned into my conscience from my childhood in Passaic New Jersey 
Women workers painted watch dials with radium tipped brushes which they 
licked to get the needed fine tip. They all died of radiation injury, 
some of them most horribly with cancers of the mouth. Yet, no one was 
to blame - the knowledge simple was not there at the time" 
If one appreciates the role of ignorance as well as of mistakes, 
it behooves us again to proceed with utmost caution, to carry out the 
necessary experiments to test all of the reasonable hypotheses - and even 
some of the unreasonable ones. Dr. Fredrickson. We are not God - we are 
only puny mortals, deal ling with lives of other puny mortals as well. 
3. W ORKER PROTECTION 
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