195 
MS. KING: Is there anything that asks universities or institutions to 
voluntarily, with respect to the institutional biohazards committees, also 
maintain some type of monitoring or surveillance over non-Government funded 
research? If you can't force them to do it, have we asked them to do it 
voluntarily? 
DR. FREDRICKSON: No, not explicitly, but we have proposed some language 
which may be considered for addition to the current provision dealing with 
that question, and we will come back to that. 
Sir John. 
SIR JOHN KENDREW: The Committee might be interested to know about what 
happens in at least one of the European countries. Dr. Walters mentioned the 
British situation, which closely follows your proposed revisions here. In 
the Federal Republic of Germany, the guidelines are at the moment in the 
second draft. In the first draft, there was a provision for a biohazards 
committee along the lines of what is to be found in the draft here, but in the 
second draft all reference to this committee has been deleted. It might, of 
course, change before the guidelines are finalized, but at the present time 
the German proposal is to not have a local biohazards committee. 
Speaking for myself and having char&e of an international laboratory 
constructing a P4 facility, but naturally as this laboratory is on German 
territory, it has to follow German guidelines, I intend, despite the lack 
of requirement, to have a biohazards committee. I intend to create a com- 
mittee of this kind with a very similar composition to that outlined in the 
present revised draft Guidelines here, because I believe that it is important 
to have such a committee whether the German guidelines require it or not. 
Furthermore, as to biological safety officer, I have already appointed a 
biological safety officer who is a full-time staff member with no other 
responsibilities except to be biological safety officer. 
DR. FREDRICKSON: Last year, Sir John, I visited with members of the 
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Max Planck, and the German universi- 
ties, and came to the conclusion that the creation of institutional biohazards 
committees would be an extraordinary thing for the current and traditional 
German university structure. What you tell me is very interesting. 
Dr. Sinsheimer. 
DR. SINSHEIMER: One of the persistent problems with the biohazards 
committee is that in order to have sufficient expertise on the committee, you 
need to have investigators who are actually doing recombinant DNA work, which 
creates a small conflict of interest. Within a large committee this is 
manageable. But I was wondering with regard to the biological safety officer 
whether you had given any consideration to whether that could also be a person 
who was engaged in recombinant DNA research. 
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