When is 3 . spliced gene not spliced? 
In recent months, Jeremy Rifkin and the Foundation on Economic Trends have 
scandalized the scientific carnnunity and the fledgling biotechnology industry by 
obtaining legal injunctions against the continued testing and projected use of 
two nutait microorganisms developed with the aid of gene splicing. 
The two engineered microorganisms are a strain of Pseudomonas bacteria that 
can no longer produce a substance around which plant-damaging ice crystals form 
and an avirulent derivative of pseudorabies virus for use as a vaccine. These 
two strains have potentially major economic benefits, promising to alleviate 
frost damage to certain crop plants and to control pseudorabies, a very serious 
disease of swine. They are thus among the exciting first fruits of modem 
biotechnology. Although neither of the new strains contains foreign DNA or any 
spliced gene, the mutant organisms are technically covered by the NIH Guidelines 
for Recombinant Dt^V Research, merely because gene splicing techniques were 
utilized in their development. Consequently, because the laboratories 
developing and testing the new strains may not have adhered precisely to the 
extant regulations, based on the Guidelines, that govern the release of gene- 
spliced organisms into the environment, they left themselves vulnerable to 
litigation. Admittedly, the legal decisions in both cases were technically 
correct; but the true basis of this unfortunate sequence of events is a 
scientifically invalid provision of the Guidelines that has carried over into 
legally binding regulations. 
As chairman of the group of five scientists who prepared a document that 
served as the first draft of the guidelines in 1974, I can state with some 
assurance that our purpose was to ensure that novel hybrid organisms produced by 
the splicing in the test tube of genes from two or more progenitor species would 
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