Dr. Donald Fredrickson 
December 27, 1977 
page -4- 
and I believe you can find examples on your transcript of the meeting where 
different individuals make exactly opposite estimates of relative risks for 
this reason.) At any rate, whenever we reach the point where the discussion 
of risks does not concern the object at hand but rather some possible product 
several steps removed from it, we must ask whether the concern is really 
recombinant DNA rather than simply the vagaries of the natural genetic lottery. 
Now obviously these two examples do not prove that recombinant DNA research is 
safe; nor even that a good theoretical argument for danger cannot be made. I'm 
just saying that, either such an argument has not yet been made, or else I have 
not yet seen it or understood it. Perhaps some pastiche of the public statements 
of Paul Berg, George Wald and Bob Sinsheimer could be composed that already 
constitutes such an argument to intellects more perceptive than my own. But 
as years pass and nothing appears that is laid out in a form that I can analyze, 
I have increasing doubts that anything is really there. (Part of the problem 
is that most of what has been said to date consists of rather informal statements, 
which the listener or reader must formalize for himself if he is to take them 
seriously. Thus, while Jim Watson's concerns about latent tumor viruses may 
have been unfounded, perhaps other individuals were making different assumptions 
about the same material, and perhaps their concerns do warrant our attention. 
Until they spell out their assumptions in detail, I'll never know for sure. 
Similarly, I feel that much of the discussion at Asilomar ignored the role of 
natural selection that has since been forcefully emphasized by Bernie Davis. 
I don't know just what was in the back of other people's minds, but very little 
of what surfaced indicated awareness of the fact that phages and plasmids put 
out into nature are not spreading into a ecological vacuum, as they can do in 
the laboratory, but rather are in direct competition with their natural counter- 
parts in a world that is already saturated with phages and plasmids. This is not 
too surprising, in that molecular biologists don't spend too much time thinking 
about Malthusian equilibria and their implications. But in this area again, 
the main need was for more thought rather than for more data, and I personally 
derive more assurance from the general principles of population biology than from 
the specific results of feeding tests with Eh coli K-12 . I say this even though 
the one population biologist who attended the Falmouth conference and subsequently 
communicated about it to you (Bruce Levin) doesn't evidence much interest in the 
role of competition either (for reasons best known to himself) .) 
What I hear Bob Sinsheimer saying now, for instance, is mainly, "Artificial 
recombinants are new, and therefore might have unexpected properties, including 
bad ones." I agree completely with that; and if that was all that Asilomar 
was about, well and good. But that's a far different statement from the assertion 
that DNA recombinant research is expected to be hazardous. I've gone into all 
this at such length because I believe that many of the attitudes presently taken 
toward DNA recombinant research have been colored by the notion that there is such 
an expectation. 
Certainly I don't blame the organizers of Asilomar for raising the issue without 
formalizing their fears into a serious theory. But I do find it noteworthy that, 
since Asilomar, neither experimental facts nor good theoretical arguments have 
been produced to reinforce those fears. 
[Appendix A — 159] 
