44 
The Committee a year ago commissioned the idea of a workshop to get 
broader input to try to get this relevant risk-assessment data out in 
organized form, and to get the involvement of the people who knew this 
field. We had an organizing committee which was rather broadly repre- 
sentative of experts and of political views. We selected Sherry Gorbach, 
who had been one of the most clear-cut leaders in this field of thinking 
at our first informal consultants group. We selected him as a possible 
organizer of this meeting; he accepted. A contract was given to Tufts 
for Gorbach to handle this under contract. It was meant to be a tech- 
nical meeting of the worldwide experts in the field of intestinal infec- 
tion, and what factors might be involved in E. coli. It was a technical, 
medical group of people. It was not meant to be a political group. It was 
a risk-assessment background input meeting. 
We discussed the biology of E. coli, the factors that enter into 
whether an organism will be an enteropathogen or not, the different types 
of disease. We talked about how recombinant DNA research might alter 
this or create a pathogen out of a very nonpathogenic organism, what it 
takes to colonize with E. coli K-12, what it takes to get plasmid transfer 
in vivo and in vitro, what are the properties of the new derivative, "non- 
mobilizable" plasmids, what is known about those, what experiments should 
be done to validate and fill in the gaps. 
A report was made to the Committee by me on the day after the con- 
ference, an informal report, and that was just a sense of the meeting. 
Because of the importance of the general field, Dr. Gorbach wrote a let- 
ter. It was sent to all the participants, and the only comments were the 
three that were mentioned. There were no objections to Gorbach's letter 
from anyone that I know of except for the two or three letters cited from 
Levin and King, and in general I don't think they were strong criticisms. 
The only criticism there was that the sense of whether plasmid trans- 
fer might occur in vivo is imminent or a very outside, unlikely possibility. 
The report of the meeting in more formal terms is in progress. It 
is moving along very well, but as anyone knows who works with publishing 
conferences, it takes a very long time to publish a transcript in an 
edited, author-approved, author-reapproved , and published manuscript. 
DR. STETTEN : Thank you, Dr. Rowe. 
MR. HUTT : Could we know — when you say it is in progress--when it 
will be available? 
DR. ROWE: We have tentative plans to have it published by the Journal 
of Infectious Disease as a formal presentation, hopefully in the late spring. 
MR. HUTT: Would it be available in typewritten form? 
DR. ROWE: Materials are available. The transcript is available 
for people to look at. It is so rough, and it is not author-approved, 
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