MAXINE SINGER 
National Institutes of Health 
Bethesda. Maryland 20205 
October 4, 1984 
Dr. William J. Gartland 
Executive Secretary, RAC 
Building 31, Room 3B10 
National Institutes of Health 
Bethesda, MD 20205 
Dear Bill: 
I write to express my opposition to the proposed amendments 
to the NIH Guidelines submitted by Jeremy Rifkin. Everything I 
know about biology and about the history of science leads me to 
believe that his stated reasons in favor of these amendments are 
specious and irrational, both as science and as public policy. 
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of his proposal is that it 
will confuse and mislead the American public about current science 
and the policies governing research. History, from Galileo through 
Lysenko, teaches us that mysticism can never yield rational and 
wise public policy in scientific matters. Yet mysticism is the 
basis of Mr. Rifkin' s proposal. 
The notion that a species has a telos (a purpose) contravenes 
everything we know about biology. Species can have, and many in 
the past have had a telos (an end), namely extinction. That is 
the only telos known to exist. No species we know of has a fixed 
genome. Quite the contrary. Genetic studies throughout this 
century have again and again confirmed that the genetic make-up 
of organisms within a species is continually changing through 
recombination, mutation, deletion, duplication, rearrangement and 
insertion of DNA sequences. Recent experiments have, if anything, 
shown us that this remarkable plasticity is more extensive than we 
imagined and is a fundamental property of living matter. Living 
things are changeable, not fixed. Furthermore, this attribute 
of living systems is confirmed by the large number of structural 
variants of specific genes that exist in normal individuals 
including humans. Thus the proposals seem to be aimed at pre- 
serving something which does not exist. 
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