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invoked for some very odd things, so I would like to ask Dr. Davis to please 
be careful how he uses theological language, if he expects me to be careful 
how I use the genetics language. 
(Laughter . ) 
DR. DAVIS: May I substitute "the Creator" next time? 
DR. FREDRICKSON: Are there any other questions for Dr. Davis? 
Then I would like to turn to the public witnesses, and call first upon 
Professor James Watson, who is the Director of the Cold Spring Harbor 
Laboratory on Long Island. 
Dr. Watson. 
DR. WATSON: As one of the signers of the original moratorium, I apolo- 
gize to society. I think it reflected two fears. Maybe you could call them 
paranoid. One, of cancer, which all of us have reflected in different ways, 
is an awful thing. And the second was of the Agency. Sort of left-wing 
liberals like myself don't like the CIA. So the original moratorium, I think, 
reflected the thought that maybe "a cancer gene would spread to society" and 
you didn't want to do that. And second, well, you might make some bad bug 
which could be used to do in somebody that shouldn't be done in legally. 
This second one I never thought much of because I was once an advisor to the 
Government at Fort Detrick, and it never seemed to me a very practical thing. 
Well, I think, at that time, i f we had thought, we would have realized 
we were very silly, because we are all infected by these viruses, SV40 and 
their type, every Herpes virus — they can all transform cells. And we are 
living with this, and the added risk of a sort of Rube Goldberg scenario of 
getting into E. coli and then getting back to us; we shouldn't have done it 
at all, it was just sloppiness. All of us, we shouldn't have done it. 
That led to Asilomar, and Asilomar then produced what I thought was a 
total disaster, an attempt to quantitate risks when there was no evidence 
at all that any of it was dangerous. 
DR. FREDRICKSON: Can you speak up, please? 
DR. WATSON: Yes. There was no evidence that anything was more dangerous 
than the other. That PI, P2, and P3 were a response to different sorts of 
dangers was a figment of people's imaginations. And in response, I think, to 
look good. Everyone else was guilty, so we might as well do it, especially 
since it wouldn't harm our research because of the safe vector. The safe 
vector has turned out to be a lot harder to show is safe, and we got ourselves 
in the position of having to prove that what we were doing is safe rather 
than — I think the only way a free society can operate is to let people do 
what they want unless you can show that, you know, an ant has died, something 
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