235 
has been harmed. But there has been no evidence that any of this, I think, 
will really lead — Now, you can always make madman scenarios, but I don't 
think so. 
Now, when you got to that situation and then it got out to the public, 
as far as I can see it, one essentially sort of got afraid of all this 
illegitimate sex that we were creating in the sense of mixing up things that 
don't normally mix up. Upon reflection, that was again very silly, because 
with viruses — And now we know that DNA travels all around, and you can't 
prove that when a mosquito bites you that you don't get some mosquito DNA, 
but it might explain some of our neighbors' behavior, you can never tell. 
Or gnats, certainly. 
(Laughter . ) 
We as scientists are always very cautious to say that what happens in 
E . col i transduction would happen otherwise, but I think DNA moves around a 
lot. It probably doesn't always do good. I doesn't necessarily do bad, 
but it is going to happen. And I think what we are going to do with recom- 
binant DNA using E. col i is just trivial. I think this finally became clear 
when Congress took it up, and finally before the Senate Committee called a 
halt, they had a preamble to the bill which also was going to start worrying 
about ordinary experiments with bacterial sexuality, because they might be 
dangerous. You could have a committee to say what is safe there, and then 
you should worry that even human sexuality produces offspring that we can't 
predict. Maybe we should have a committee there. And the whole thing is 
that we just don't know. We don't live in a risk-free society. So far as I 
can see this great institute which this place represents is trying to do 
something to help sick people, and sort of prevent further misery. I think 
that is the real function. 
I think the thought that we are trying to do research for our own 
careers, sure, if we make a success our career gets advanced, but I think that 
many of us seriously think of--say we are working on viruses, we like our 
results to be used for society. I think we are totally diverted away from the 
true mission of the National Institutes of Health, on totally, in a sense, a 
witchhunt, because there is no evidence that any danger exists. The amount of 
money, the amount of psychic time which is diverted away from us working on 
cancer, which is what my own institute does, has been enormous. It has been 
not a total catastrophe, but a mild one, and it can get worse. 
I think if you want to pass laws, you know, you could do it against 
pathogenic microorganisms. You could go into hospitals, you could see 
whether it was safe for the doctors to see the patients, and you would quick 
give up, because it is just too hard. NIH could take to regulate the re- 
search on viruses done here. There is very little. The real reason is that 
microbiology has proceeded without doing in society. We think that it has, 
in fact, helped society. That is why the Director is not having sleepless 
nights worrying about how many P3 facilities there are over in allergy and 
infectious diseases. Damn few, I can tell you. That is probably not one of 
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