- 3 - 
their recommendations. Several unscheduled "workshops" were 
also held during "free" times to design and plan construction of safer 
cloning vehicles (plasmids and phages) and safer bacterial hosts (see 
Appendix G). The nearly unanimous acceptance of the recommendations 
emerging from the Conference indicates that these unscheduled events 
were useful and germinal. 
The task of summarizing the views and conclusions developed 
at the Conference was accepted by the Organizing Committee. A 
statement, entitled "Provisional Statement of the Conference Proceed- 
ings" (Appendix H) was drafted at the end of the third day of the Confer- 
ence and served as the working document for the discussion during the 
final ses sion of the meeting. As expected, the conclusions and recom- 
mendations offered in the document elicited contrary views, particularly 
as to the assessment of the risks and how to deal with them. Each 
section of the provisional statement was debated, suggestions for 
deletions, additions, and modifications in the wording were considered 
and in the end the Conference participants voted by hands for adoption 
or rejection of the various amended propositions. Left unchallenged, 
and supported by the overwhelming majority of the participants, was 
the recommendation that most of the research with synthetic recom- 
binant DNAs could proceed provided that the experiments were performed 
under conditions which ensure a minimum of risk to the experimenters 
and the public at large. Moreover, there was virtually unanimous 
acceptance of the principle that adequate containment, both physical 
and biological, must be considered an essential feature of each parti- 
cular experimental protocol. At the meeting's end it was agreed that 
the Organizing Committee would redraft the statement so that it would 
reflect the discussions and positions adopted by the balloting at the 
Conference as well as views offered by written submissions following 
the Conference. 
The agreed upon principles, together with more s'pecific recom- 
mendations and guidelines, are included in a revised statement entitled 
"Summary Statement of the Asilomar Conference on Rccombinand DNA 
Molecules" (Appendix I). Inasmuch as section 5 of the Provisional 
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