APPENDIX 
[From the Washington Post Dec If, l'#7f ] 
Discovered Would Lift Curbs ok DNA 
(By Victor Cohn) 
Dr. James Watson, the Nobel Prize-winning co-discoverer of the structure of 
DNA, the stuff , of genes, surprised colleagues yesterday by calling for an end to 
government restrictions on DNA research as unneeded “nonsense.” 
He said “there is no evidence” that experiments in recombining DNA can do 
anyone any harm, the time and dollars wasted on maintaining restrictions is 
“enormous,” and he and other scientists who recommended the precautions in 
the first place were "stupidly” wrong. 
The emotional plea from the slender, intense Watson — who three years ago just 
as emotionally called for the restrictions — sent a shockwave through a National 
Institutes of Health advistory committee weighing changes in the restrictions. 
But it did not make any of the advisers recommend abandoning them entirely 
without more evidence that some of the original fears of Watson and other scien- 
tists can be forgotten. 
The advisers, in fact, ended a two-day public hearing with a discussion in which 
most of them endorsed most of NIH's new plans to modify the restrictions but 
keepthem in effect for most researchers. 
“Watson has put some questions in our mind that I think we need to consider 
very carefully.” but “I don’t think he’s right — he’s his usual extreme,” said Dr. 
Walter Rosenblith, provost of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 
“Jim is speaking, I think, for a large group of scientists” — that is, a probable 
majority who now agree with him — and much of what he says may be correct,” 
commented Dr. Alexander Rich of MIT ; co-chairman of a National Academy of 
Sciences forum on the DNA problem this year. But the “prudent” and “correct” 
course, he said, is to modify the rules only as new evidence shows the research to, 
be safe It was the “extreme” Watson who, as an extremely emotional and highly 
original young man, joined Britain’s Francis Crick to first describe the double- 
helix-shaped molecule which is the chemical of thegenes in every organism. 
Three years ago, Watson and a small group of others first warned that new 
experiments splitting and then “recombining” the DNA of various organisms 
could create new life forms having unknown powers,/. 
The precautions have become a “disaster,” Watson said yesterday, and the 
public has been misled into fearing “madman scenarios”’ 
Various scientists’ original fears were, mainly that a cancer virus might "be let 
loose, or other diseases or epidemics might be created, or that scientists might 
cause subtle but disastrous changes in the genes of even lowly animals or organ- 
isms to somehow disturb the whole earth’s ecology. 
The first two fears were the main ones Watson said laboratory experiences have 
now shown that, first of all, no one has gotten sick and, second, organisms in nature 
exchange DNA widely without disaster. 
On a scale of things to worry about, he maintained, genetic research is “trivial.” 
And “if you worry about changing man’s genetic nature,” he said, “you should 
worry” about regulating sex. “Maybe we should have a committee there” op 
require that all sex be performed at Fort Detrick,” he said. 
But some advisory committee members said genetic research is moving human- 
kind toward genetic engineering, so a pause now for reflection is wise and not rash. 
“God forbid” what the public would have thought if scientists themselves had 
not called attention to some of the dangers, said Patricia King, associate law 
professor at Georgetown University . 
The scientific evidence on recombinant DNA’s possible safety and the possible 
ubiquity of DNA combinations in nature is just starting to come in “and most of 
us haven’t seen the scientific papers yet,” said Dr. Robert Sinsheimer. A prominent 
biologist and critic of this research, he recently became chancellor to the University 
of California at Santa Cruz. 
( 71 ) 
[Appendix B — 120] 
