60 
Defense Fund is being used to try to stop the experiments we do with 
“recombinant DXA.” 
This test-tube-made genetic material now provides an incredibly 
powerful means to find out what human genes are like. And in so 
doing it will give us important new ways to think, say. about our 
immune systems, or how our blood cells are made or the nature of the 
genes that go out of control when cancer arises. 
This being so, I most certainly am a Friend of DXA and want 
work with recombinant DXA to go as fast possible. In the old days, 
this impulse would generally be viewed as good for the earth. Xow. 
however, there exist highly vocal groups who think I ? m a danger to 
the world. The Friends of "the Earth, the Sierra Club and the Xatural 
Resources Defense Council, as well as the Environmental Defense 
Fund, all say that our experiments pose a realistic threat to our way 
of life and must be constrained by their new breed of environmental 
lawyers. 
All this initially surprised me, since I had always regarded environ- 
mentalists as among our most intelligent public groups and thought 
that the original rub for work with recombinant DXA which 
had come out of the 1975 Asilomar Conference should more than re- 
assure them. Particularly since I found those guidelines a terrible 
overkill and probably not at all necessary. 
My fellow DXA workers wanted, howei-er. to act more than clean 
and certainly to give the impression of being responsible citizens. So 
they suggested that we largely work with specifically enfeebled orga- 
nisms that would not live well outside our test tubes. And when, after 
Asilomar, the matter was taken up by the Xational Institutes of 
Health, they in turn wanted to look like the perfect guardian of our 
health, and so the guidelines which we now have to live with became 
more than tough. In fact, they effectively blocked most of the better 
experiments that directly relate to cancer. 
As a result, the DXA community is now very unhappy working 
under harsh rules we do not believe necessary and which waste vast 
sums of sorely needed research funds. TTe now want to relax greatly 
the guidelines we imposed upon ourselves. 
Unfortunately, we find this task to be much more complicated than 
their original drafting. Our main problem is that in our original 
statements about recombinant DXA. we kept referring to “potential 
dangers.” Instead we should have said “conjecriiral dangers,” since 
there was, and still is. not a trace of evidence that any of the experi- 
ments pose a threat to those who do them, much less to the general 
public. 
In being so linguistically sloppy, we gave a long awaited opening to 
two groups which were out to embarrass us. The first consists of dis- 
gruntled long-out-of-productive-science biochemists, who use any op- 
portunitv to say bad things about how the effects of modem science 
are carried out. The other is a tiny, though noisv. group of Boston- 
based academic leftists who fantasize that the rich will finally sub- 
[ Appendix B — 319] 
