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way to develop safe vaccines by the conventional technique because of the 
possible oncogenic properties of Herpes. I discussed it with Dr. June Osborn, 
who is here. Recombinant DNA would be a good way to produce a safe vaccine 
and in this way to protect women from this painful and terrible affliction. 
And at the present moment this is practically impossible because of the 1976 
Guidelines. Time does not permit me to go further but I hope I made the main 
point . 
DR. FREDRICKSON: We will circulate your document, and you have a letter 
in the book which is also available. 
DR. SZYBALSKI: I will be glad to answer questions. 
DR. FREDRICKSON: I wonder. Dr. Szybalski, if we might withhold those 
questions until we have now gone through — 
DR. SZYBALSKI: I don't have questions, but somebody else might. 
DR. FREDRICKSON: Right. I am going to restrain the Committee, if I may, 
at the moment. 
Let me then call on Dr. Liberman, who is the MIT Biohazard Assessment 
Officer, who hasn't yet appeared. 
DR. LIBERMAN: I have a couple of points that I would like to make, and 
I will do them as quickly as I can in view of the time. There is one area I 
would like to mention first. I was going to wait until tomorrow, because that 
is when roles and responsibilities were going to be discussed, but since one 
of the previous individuals commented on the composition of biohazard committees, 
I happen to be on three of them in the Cambridge area, and I seem to feel, as 
well as my colleagues, as well as the people in Cambridge, including the 
Cambridge Biohazard Committee, that we are doing a pretty good job in what we 
are doing. We have extensive broad-based experienced personnel on all levels 
of science as well as non-science areas, including modern ethics and religion, 
and I think that the point has to be made, if an investigator wants to break 
the NIH Guidelines he can do it very easily. The institutions rely on the 
integrity of the scientific personnel of the institutions to stay within the 
Guidelines. Now, there is no way any member of the committee can look inside 
a test tube and say whether or not it is mammalian or whether it is human, or 
whether it is rat or rabbit DNA in there. So you have to make some sort of 
value judgments based on what the institution is and what it stands for. 
Now, this may not be acceptable to some individuals, but until we have 
probes that can distinguish between 100 base pairs of various kinds of DNA 
specifically, we have to make some sort of assumptions. 
Now, the points that I would like to make are as follows, and it is 
basically stemming from the fact — they are all tied in with, I guess, the 
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