73 
DR. FREDRICKSON: There are no known infections reported from work- 
ing with recombinant DNA? 
DR. BARKLEY: Not to my knowledge. 
DR. FREDRICKSON: We are going to stop for lunch promptly at 1:00, 
but we have five minutes. There are four public witnesses, the invited 
witnesses having just been completed. There are four public witnesses who 
wish to speak on physical containment, and we will have time for one or two 
of those, dependent upon the amount of their allotment of five minutes they 
need to take. 
May I call upon Dr. Schwartz first? Dr. Schwartz. 
DR. SCHWARTZ: My concern is that the Guidelines are based on insuf- 
ficient risk analysis, and I shall discuss these problems in greater detail 
when I talk about biological containment, so I will restrict my remarks to 
problems I see specific to physical containment that are not involved in 
biological containment. 
One thing that I think has hardly been considered at all is the problem 
of, first of all, improperly designed equipment. We assume we have an auto- 
clave, or a centrifuge or a containment cabinet or what have you, that works. 
But that is not necessarily the case. We have lots and lots of experience in 
this world with improperly designed equipment. After 100 years the automo- 
biles still have basic flaws in their design, not just their manufacture. 
This brings me to the next problem, and that is even though the design 
may be sound, the manufacture may be improper. It may be produced properly, 
but then there is always the possibility that it will be used improperly, 
maintained improperly, you could have everything working fine and something 
will just break down; the equipment just breaks down for no particular reason 
except perhaps age or what have you. On top of that you have the concern, 
when you make the risk-assessment, you have to concern yourself with the 
problems of power failure, and auxiliary power failures. Do you have a 
situation that all too frequently occurs where you think you have backup 
equipment but something comes along and shuts everything down, backup, 
frontup, everything — what is known as common-mode failures. Both physical 
and biological containment can be breached by natural di sasters--tornadoes 
and fires, and earthquakes and whatnot. 
It has been argued that experience with naturally dangerous pathogens 
has proven the efficacy of physical containment. I submit that this is 
an unwarranted conclusion. To begin with, the containment was breached 
at Fort Detrick and other places, and after the infections were discovered 
immunization programs were increased or introduced. So the physical con- 
tainment alone was not sufficient. We introduced a form of biological 
containment, in fact. And there was some biological containment in the 
form of natural immunity already present. 
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