bacterial physiology unit 
HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL 
Bernard D. Davis. M.d. 
Adele Lehman Professor 
of Bacterial Physiology 
Boston, Massachusetts 0211s 
Telephone. (617) -7-a4 < se» 
732-2022 
December 23, 1977 
Dr. Donald Fredrickson 
NIH 
Bethesda, Maryland 20014 
Dear Don: 
I was grateful for the opportunity to testify before your Advisory Committee 
on the proposed revisions in the recombinant DNA guidelines, and I hope my remarks 
were useful. 
I was asked to provide supplementary information on the benefits to be 
expected from research with this new technology. I have summarized these briefly 
on the first page the enclosed paper from the American Scientist, and I think 
it would be of little help to expand this material, although I could make many 
more extensive guesses. It might be of value to distribute the whole paper to 
the members of the committee, since some of them must wonder how scientists in 
the field can have become so much less apprehensive than they were initially, 
and this paper attempts, among other things, to explain why excessive anxiety 
was aroused at the beginning. 
I would like to take the liberty of making a suggestion regarding further 
committees that might be considering later revisions. The present committee had 
only one microbiologist out of seventeen members, and he was a virologist rather 
than an expert on enteric bacteria. Since the key issues turn out, again and again, 
to hinge on technical questions in infectious disease, it seems to be that the 
presence of several experts in infectious disease and particularly enteric infections 
might have helped to^ correct erroneous statements that crept into the discussion. 
There were quite a few such statements at last week’s meeting, which necessarily 
went unchallenged. 
One additional point. Some committee members were no doubt shocked by 
Jim Watson's statement that he would allow investigators to carry out any 
experiments they wished with recombinant DNA, without regulations. Without 
qualifications, this statement must seem irresponsible to an outsider. I 
subsequently asked Dr. Watson whether he would not expect that any investigator 
dealing with a hazardous source of DNA, such as a toxigenic bacterium, would 
treat that material and the recombinant with the usual precautions for dealing 
with such pathogenic organisms. He said, "of course that’s just common sense". 
[Appendix A — 146] 
