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mean to say that responsible citizens, no matter what their profession, 
should the Guidelines be enacted into law, would not follow them? 
DR. TOOZE: Can I respond to that? 
DR. FREDRICKSON: Yes, please do. 
DR. TOOZE: I think I explained at the very beginning that in Europe we 
are still talking about conjectural hazards, and guidelines, not laws. As 
soon as something becomes law and somebody disobeys it, they are criminally 
forfeit. What I said was that if guidelines do not command, for scientific 
reasons, do not command the consensus respect of the people who are supposed 
to be following them, you will have great difficulty enforcing them. In fact, 
people will not, in my opinion, follow laws which they believe to be nonsen- 
sical. I am not saying that all the NIH Guidelines are nonsensical. I was 
pointing to certain categories with various experiments. That is all I was 
saying . 
Concerning the other part, I think we have to reach an opinion on some 
data. Some groups will say — Jonathan King, and I entirely agree with him, 
says that he doesn't feel that with E. coli K-12 there is the slightest risk 
of an epidemic situation. I think we all agree. The question then is how 
much you want to protect the people who are working in the laboratory. It 
seems to me that the employers owe some responsibility to their staff, but 
getting infections in microbiology laboratories is an occupational hazard, 
like having a piece of coal fall on your head is in a coal mine. You do the 
best in both cases to set up regulation and machinery to minimize the chances 
of industrial accidents, but when you work in a microbiology laboratory, you 
must expect to run the risk of a microbiological accident to the individual 
staff. And we agree, I think, that as long as we are using E. coli K-12 the 
epidemic situation is not relevant. 
DR. FREDRICKSON: Now, Ms. Simring, your five minutes begins. 
MS. SIMRING: Oh, I had one more question to ask him. 
(Laughter . ) 
DR. FREDRICKSON: One minute for this reenactment of the Lincoln- 
Douglas debate. 
(Laughter . ) 
MS. SIMRING: I think it is in part a tribute to the day that we have 
this kind of give and take. 
In the proposed French guidelines of June of '77, the NIH definition of 
novel recombinant DNA was stated to be "ill-defined." The definition in the 
French guidelines is clear and succinct to me and to some others. It is very 
short. "Genetic engineering refers to in vivo multiplication of molecules 
which have been constructed through in vitro recombination of DNA segments." 
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