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DR. FREDRICKSON: Dr. Wright, you are wandering into areas of legal 
and regulatory responsibility which are the subject of tomorrow. 
DR. WRIGHT: Well, Dr. Fredrickson, I have to give a talk at the Sloan 
Kettering Institute tomorrow, and I won't be present, so if I could just 
reply to Dr. Tooze now, it would be very helpful to me. 
MR. HUTT: I would prefer that she be allowed to continue this directly 
in point to what was asked earlier. 
DR. FREDRICKSON: Of course she may. Please, continue. 
DR. WRIGHT: Thank you, Dr. Fredrickson. 
The Health and Safety at Work Act provides for regulations to be promul 
gated by the Health and Safety Commission, which is the rough British equiv- 
alent of OSHA. That organization has substantial authority under the Act to 
conduct inspections, to enforce regulations, and to promulgate regulations 
about any activity that poses hazards in the work place, and has done that. 
A second comment on the British situation is that the proposals for the 
research are being reviewed by the Genetic Manipulation Advisory Committee, 
and I just wanted to amplify what Nancy Pfund said about — It is a fairly 
broadly representative body with not one but four trade union members on it, 
industrial representatives, members of the public — I think four lay members 
of the public — as well as scientific members. So it is a fairly broadly 
representative group. 
I should point out that I am only talking about the review of proposals 
because the British code of practice and broad British policy was drawn up 
in a way that bears general similarities to the American process — namely, it 
was conducted under the MRC, which is the rough equivalent of the NIH, al- 
though there are a lot of differences. But the broad function of the MRC is 
to promote biomedical research. So the policy decisions which were made 
earlier did not have broad public input. But at this later stage, there has 
ct.rtainly been considerable representation. I wanted to make that clear. 
In addition, perhaps a private scientific organization such as EMBO 
can concern itself only with purely scientific matters, although I would 
have trouble with that, but I certainly don't think that a national com- 
mittee can. Policy decisions — and I will come back to the question of the 
objectivity of science later — but policy decisions are intrinsically mixed 
with technical decisions, because a decision to lower containment is also 
a decision to open up this field, and that means that many more genetic 
engineers are going to be trained in this field. I haven't heard anyone 
yet who has argued that willful abuse of these techniques will be impos- 
sible in the future. Until we can be sure of that, we have a question 
about where these genetic engineers that we will train in such numbers are 
going to go, and I don't think we can say that we have control over that. 
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