252 
DR. SCHWARTZ: I am speaking of the formation of the biohazards com- 
mittee. When I called the administration, I wasn't even told how it was 
being formed, let alone invited to participate in any way in the formation 
of the committee or on the committee itself. 
DR. FREDRICKSON: Dr. Ahmed. 
DR. AHMED: One point that Dr. Schwartz made now I think is very sig- 
nificant, and the question is the role of NIH as a regulatory agency. This 
was raised before. Your analogy is a very relevant one. You said the old 
AEC had both the role of being a promoter and a regulator, and we know what 
happened to that particular model; it was finally split up into two different 
operating arms now. And we realize that there may be an inherent conflict 
of interest in this matter. I think this question that you posed is a very 
important one for us to consider on the Committee here, or I guess at NIH, 
is how can you really have a disinterested ability to regulate something that 
you are at the same time in effect promoting. Is this what you think, that 
NIH is really a promoting agency in the same model as the old AEC used to be? 
DR. SCHWARTZ: It seems very similar to me . I want to emphasize that 
part of regulation is not just enforcement but to perceive what you have to 
regulate, what the dangers are. If the promoting agency determines all the 
things that need to be regulated it has, to some extent, invaded the regu- 
latory function, even though they say they are not going to be the inspector- 
ate . 
DR. FREDRICKSON: Mr. Helms. 
MR. HELMS: Just for the record, do I understand you to say that the 
probabilities of something beneficial resulting from this research are 
negligible? 
DR. SCHWARTZ: No, I am saying that you have to weigh, in addition to 
accidents, when we talk about the end-result, assuming that everything goes 
the way we hope it will go, then some of the things that I think may very 
well be developed — you have to multiply what you get times the probability 
of it happening, and that is not an easy thing to do. But I am concerned 
with the fact that first of all you have the opportunity costs of doing the 
research, so that is a negative. In other words, you are losing benefits 
that could have been done by the same highly trained, expensive researchers 
in their expensive facilities, so there is an opportunity cost which is 
negative. In addition to which there are military applications which I 
consider very negative, sociobiological uses that were discussed by Dr. 
Suzuki, which I think are extraordinarily negative, and the tendency to 
promote the reliance on technological fixes to problems that we already 
have the means to solve, but use the excuse of well, pretty soon science 
will come up with a great solution, so we don't have to bend our efforts to 
solve these problems. These are negative results of doing the research. 
[ 456 ] 
