APRIL 27-28-MINUTES OF MEETING 
5 
II. SUMMARY OF RECOMMENDATIONS FOR CHANGES IN THE PROPOSED REVISED 
GUIDELINES - SELECTED ISSUES FOR CONHITTTEE REVIEW 
Attached to the Minutes (Attachment II) is a document entitled "Selected 
Issues for Oommittee Review" that was sent to RAC members. A number 
of questions were addressed to the RAC. For the purpose of the Minutes 
Attachment II has been annotated in the margin to indicate questions,i.e., 
A, B, C/ etc. 
A. The RAC unanimously accepted this suggestion that the 
definition of recombinant DMA (and therefore the scope of 
the Guidelines) cover recombinant ENA molecules whether 
inside or outside of organisms. The "prohibitions" and 
"exemptions" sections to follow will then make recombinant 
DNA molecules outside of organises or viruses either 
prohibited (for example, derived from Class 3, 4, or 5 
organisms as defined in the CDC "Classification of Etiologic 
Agents on the Basis of Hazard") or exempt from the Guidelines 
( see below) . 
B. The RAC accepted the suggestion that the definition of 
recombinant DNA not include the items "capacity to infect" 
or "natural physiological processes." The proposed substitute 
definition in Attachment II was accepted, except that the 
RAC wanted the words "or be integrated into the genome 
of" to be deleted. Their suggested definition would 
thus speak to "molecules that have been constructed outside 
living cells by joining natural or synthetic DNA segments 
to DNA molecules that can replicate in a living cell." 
C. The RAC concurred with the concept of moving the pro- 
hibited experiments before the exempted experiments so 
that the exemptions would not apply to experiments previously 
described as being prohibited. The Committee then entered 
into a lengthy and detailed discussion of the five classes 
of exempted experiments (see Attachment III for proposed 
list of exemptions) . 
Class i ; 
The RAC adopted exemption (i), but then voted (10 in favor, 
2 opposed) to delete all material from exemption (i) which 
appeared in parentheses and move it instead to Appendix D of 
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