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research of the type concerned is carried out and correspondingly the number of 
people involved. 
On a more positive note I would like specifically to endorse the provision within 
the revised Guidelines for discretion by the Director of NIH to permit relaxation 
of containment requirements for specific purposes. I would hope that this discretion 
would be used principally to allow the performance of risk assessment experiments-- 
and particularly not be used merely to allow the performance in this country of 
experiments that may be performed in (misguided?) foreign lands. 
I would also favor the elimination, from the Guidelines, of regulation of those 
experiments which are simply laboratory duplications of those recombinations occurring 
frequently in Nature. (In this regard I do not consider the "new" evidence regarding 
the possible formation of inter-species recombinants in Nature as a serious argument 
against the "novelty" of recombinant DNA research. It is not meaningful to compare 
the possible production of a chimeric organism, at some wholly unknown frequency in 
Nature with the deliberate synthesis and growth of lO 10 - 10 12 chimeric organisms 
in a single experiment. The argument can be further reduced to absurdity by pointing 
out that it is now readily feasible to make combinations of DNAs wholly improbable 
ever to come together in Nature.) 
I would also favor the exclusion of all PI EK1 experiments from the guidelines, etc. 
as I do not believe this category provides a meaningful degree of containment. 
As a last point I believe it is very important to institute a routine program to 
monitor and report upon the health status of all personnel engaged in research with 
recombinant DNA, tumor viruses, pathogenic organisms, etc. It is simply meaningless 
to state (as is done) that "no one has ever been made ill by recombinant DNA research," 
when there is no baseline against which such illness (unless of near epidemic 
proportion) would be detected. (It should also be borne in mind that a significant 
lag period can be involved — as was the case with radiologists — before an occupational 
hazard may be detected. ) 
As always, I empathize with the difficulty of your decisions. 
[Appendix A — 182] 
