but these are not being made because of the difficult and arcane 
procedure necessary to put these vectors into use. 
4. Given an imperfect but improved set of Guidelines, I am particularly 
concerned about our inability to use physical containment in place 
of biological containment. For example, certain modifications of 
the bacteriophage A might considerably increase its usefulness as 
a vector. This is true of plasmid vectors as well. None of these 
could be introduced and used without an elaborate clearance process 
under the revised Guidelines. At the very least, EK1 vectors should 
be available for shotgun experiments using the DNA of higher organisms 
if a P3 facility is used. In short, the revised Guidelines repre- 
sent an improvement. But they still fail to make good scientific 
sense. I am afraid that this limitation will prevent their adop- 
tion as an international standard for the conduct of this research. 
The consequences of this will be to put research in this country 
at a decided disadvantage, without preserving for ourselves any 
advantage with respect to safety. 
' [A-384] 
