255 
I would like to restate something that I emphasized at the very begin- 
ning of this meeting yesterday morning. That was that I am especially 
interested that the members of the Director's Advisory Committee provide 
us with their judgments on the merits of the proposed revisions and that 
ideally I had hoped that we would be able to have a brief oral summary this 
afternoon, taking into account the comments and the discussion that you have 
heard during this past day and a half. I think that your reactions to this 
discussion relevant to the proposed revisions, including the issues of 
monitoring the research, are especially important. 
I am going to suggest that we begin that momentarily, so that we can 
assure that we have on the record even what may be preliminary, and will 
necessarily be quite brief, contributions from each member of the Committee. 
I do want to assure you that not only will you have the opportunity but you 
will have my urgent invitation to extend those remarks in a letter to us 
after this meeting has been over. 
I don't want to preclude interchange or discussion among the members, 
but I think that we will probably have to enforce a kind of similar time 
matrix down upon you that we have upon all the other witnesses, and I would 
urge you to think in terms of five minutes, and if there is some inter- 
action, allow me to be the tyrant, with the only objective being that of 
making sure we get around the table once, and then the time that remains 
to us we can, I am sure, usefully use for a continued discussion. 
Before we do that I do want to say one thing that I think may be on the 
minds of the members of the Committee, and it may help guide the manner in 
which you address that particular problem. It is to reiterate something 
that I have, personally, in speaking for NIH, now said in testifying before 
at least four congressional committees on this question of legislative 
proposals to regulate recombinant DNA experiments, and that is roughly the 
following. It is that I believe it a conflict of interest for the National 
Institutes of Health to be both the sponsor, the conductor, and the regu- 
lator in the sense of enforcer, of guidelines for this type of research. 
We feel it an important responsibility on our part to engage to the 
maximum our own resources and those of the broad community which we support 
in the preparation and promulgation of standards, but we cannot conduct here 
on this campus roughly ten percent of the research which is now under NIH 
aegis and pretend also to police the entire country, or to be the regulator 
in the sense that agencies long or recently established for the purpose of 
regulation could do. We have not the expertise, we have not the desire. 
But in the absence of legislation or of some other means for accomplishing 
this goal, NIH has attempted to the maximum of its ability to take on the 
responsibilities that exist in a voluntary, relatively self-policing system. 
I suggest this because I think it would not be wise today to talk too much 
about what form of legislation we should have, and exactly where these 
regulatory roles should be played. I have my own belief, as I have testi- 
fied also, that it would be to the maximum advantage of the country in the 
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