SVATfc Of CALIFORNIA — HtALTH ANO WSUAM AGINCT 
IDMUNO G. SROV/N JR. Co. ./no. 
DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH 
714-744 ? STREET 
SACRAMENTO. CALIFORNIA 95814 
(916) 445-3706 
November 7, 1977 
Honorable Adlai Stevenson 
United States Senate 
Washington, DC 20515 
Dear Senator Stevenson: 
Thank you very much for the opportunity to appear before the Commerce 
Committee which you chair. I felt that the quality and seriousness of 
our deliberations was much enhanced by your patience and astute question- 
ing. 
I would like to expand on one of my remarks which I did net have an 
opportunity to explore fully because of time constraints. As one of 
my recommendations, I urged the Committee to consider introducing 
■legislation by which Congress would declare recombinant Df!A organisms 
to be a national resource. The purpose of such a declaration would be 
to ensure that the study, development and, ultimately, mass scale 
production of recombinant organisms would take place orderly and 
systematically, in a climate of maximum safety, openness and coopera- 
tion. Licensure and dispensation of all newly constructed organisms 
could be accomplished in much the same way as the Atomic Energy Com- 
missioh (AEC) handles radioactive isotopes and primary nuclear fuels. 
Indeed, the rationale for establishing the AEC, namely to protect the 
public welfare and to ensure the safe development and deployment of 
potentially beneficial yet hazardous materials, could reasonably be 
extended to recombinant DMA organisms. 
Perhaps more pertinently, each cloned recombinant organism will almost 
always be a unique bacterial strain or even a new species of life, with 
the capacity to generate its own kind, but rarely (if ever under present 
technologies) to be duplicated by reconstruction through fresh syntheses. 
This last character is virtually guaranteed for organisms produced by 
"shot-gun" approaches, where the entire genome of an organism is 
enzymatically fragmented, to be scavenged or inserted at random into 
a vector or bacterial host. The interest of the drug companies in 
patenting novel organisms produced in such a way bespeaks the impor- 
tance and uniqueness of their construction. The protection of such 
newly made recombinant organisms might be seen in the light of the 
protection afforded rare species under the Endangered Species Act. 
[Appendix A — 33] 
