101 
a long time. Getting this one segment of Fort Detrick upgraded to the 
immensely rigorous requirements of P4 in the current Guidelines and future 
Guidelines has taken very much time. They haven't quite certified the 
system. Only trivia remain as far as safety certification. There were also 
delays in transferring jurisdiction of that half of a building with the P4 
system in it from Litton Bionet ics, back to the Government, rehiring the 
people away from Litton as Government employees, because Litton couldn't 
touch it because of the uninsurability. There is a lawsuit against it which 
has been requested to be vacated, now that the Environmental Impact Statement 
on the Guidelines has been finalized. I wish you all success. 
(Laughter . ) 
DR. AHMED: Have standardized protocols been developed to do adequate 
risk-assessment tests as was mentioned by the last speaker, that have been 
generally accepted? I mean, how do you set up such experiments and do 
it so that the experiments have some meaning, statistically speaking, or 
whatever. 
DR. FREDRICKSON: Perhaps Dr. Martin who was the other partner in this 
experiment could answer that very briefly. Malcolm. 
DR. MARTIN: I will try to answer the question. There is no such 
thing as one specific risk-assessment experiment. There may be 20 or 40 or 
100. This particular experiment that Dr. Rowe just mentioned was designed 
almost by committee. We sent letters out to colleagues around the world, 
and they made comments about how they thought certain aspects should be 
done. Actually, we are engaged in other types of risk-assessment experi- 
ments, some of which have not been circulated among as wide a group of 
people . 
This is in response to a comment that Dr. Weiss mentioned a few minutes 
ago. We, in order to do this experiment, have to stay within the Guidelines, 
and we are trying to assess risk. One part of the experiment involves the 
feeding of E. col i- cont aining polyoma virus DNA to mice. This is one of 
the concerns that people have: What will happen if somebody inadvertently 
swallows E . col i containing a potential cancer virus? This is a model 
system. The E. col i that we are using for this experiment is sensitive 
to bile. It is an EK2 certified E . col i . So before we start at least that 
one part of the experiment we know we are not going to get any results, 
because the Guidelines say you have to use this kind of E. coli. 
Now, there is another part of the experiment involving a lambda vector. 
I don't want to get too technical, but that will survive the GI tract, and 
we will get some answers with that. But all through this thing, and as 
Wally indicated, it has been two years now since we started planning this 
experiment. It seems to me we all want to know the answer one way or the 
other in order to plan for the future. We have stayed within the Guidelines, 
[ 305 ] 
