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Dr. Duvick, would you care to make some comments? 
DR. DUVICK: A few. People have asked me why I haven't spoken up 
before now, and the reason is that I don't know much about what you people 
are talking about. I am here representing myself. To a certain extent I 
represent my company, but I think I may speak for a good many plant breeders 
who have been working with recombining DNA for the past 50 and 100 years in 
more or less scientific terms, but of course on a very different level from 
that about which we have been talking today. 
We plant breeders have a specific purpose for recombining DNA, for get- 
ting chromosome recombinations, and that is to develop new, and we hope 
improved, varieties of plants which we intend to release into the environ- 
ment. My company sells them; public breeders release them free. We do 
intend to release them. We look therefore at the techniques that are being 
talked about today necessarily from the point of view not only can they be 
used in order to learn a lot more about the basic genetics, the mode of 
action of the genes that are our business — this is very important--but we 
naturally think also in terms of using these techniques: Can these tech- 
niques be used to develop new varieties which can be released? Now, this 
subject has just been discussed, and it is quite clear in the Guidelines 
that the answer, by and large, is no, with rare exceptions. 
A question that I think any plant breeder would ask is will this res- 
ponse be true for the foreseeable future, for all time to come, whatever that 
may mean. If it means that almost never can the products of this work be 
released, this means that plant breeders will have very little interest in it. 
My particular company releases each year about five to ten new varieties of 
hybrid corn, two or three new soybean varieties, and so on, going down 
through the six crops we work with. Now, this is on a scale that is much 
greater than is contemplated by the rules as I read them. I am not saying 
that they should not be that way, but I am saying that the way these rules 
turn out will have a great deal to do with the way we look at some uses of 
this technique. 
DR. FREDRICKSON: Dr. Duvick, I am going to ask you a very naive ques- 
tion. What is the difference between conventional plant breeding of the Luther 
Burbank school, and the use of recombinant DNA as you see it for this same 
purpose? 
DR. DUVICK: Okay, using recombinant DNA in the sense that it is talked 
about today, conventional plant breeding mixes up whole chromosomes, or at 
the most, portions of chromosomes. We don't know much about gene organiza- 
tion in higher plants, but there must be a fairly important reason for keep- 
ing these pieces of DNA in the orderly way that we find them. What I am 
saying is that we probably deal with blocks of genes that are together, be- 
cause they make the plants operate in a fairly orderly way. We don't mix 
these up a great deal. We mix them up as much as we can, but it really isn't 
very much, except on a long-term scale. 
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