105 
think it is a real dangerous precedent to set that seemed to be said before, 
that oh, someone is going to block this from the course of science. That 
is not it at all. No one is saying that the research should not go on. 
DR. FREDRICKSON: Dr. Hogness, do you want to respond to that, and 
then we will go on. 
DR. HOGNESS: Well, I don't see how you do research without techniques, 
and what you are essentially saying is that you can determine that without 
the technique. There are certain things that I have decided you cannot do 
without that. Therefore you are abandoning it. You are limiting inquiry. 
I don't think there is any question that there is a tie-in between how you 
do something and what you do. It is not simply in terms of a manufacture. 
DR. GOLDSTEIN: Well, it is a manufacture of whatever kind of system 
you are going to do it with. 
DR. FREDRICKSON: Dr. Goldstein says it is not a question of inquiry, 
but one of manufacture, and Dr. Hogness, for those of you who didn't hear 
him, says that manufacture is a technique that leads to inquiry, and there 
are the horns of that dilemma. 
Dr. Rosenblith? 
DR. ROSENBLITH: This is not an area in which I have any primary bio- 
logical competence, but let me just draw on a little experience that I 
think we have gained in such areas as nuclear technology and the area of 
space, and the ... accident of the astronauts. That is, in some ways we 
have felt that as our technological power increases, that there is a need 
for getting at what seems to be a reasonable commensur ability of risk and 
benefit. 
It is very clear that much of what involves the handling of plutonium 
is both tedious and not very convenient, and yet that is the way it is 
being done, because there is no other way that we have found so far of 
doing it. And I do believe that I heard a little bit too much of an all- 
or-none kind of argument here this afternoon, when that doesn't seem to 
me the argument. 
The argument is what is rational, what sets a reasonable baseline for 
self-correction as it goes along. I think that if we overinvested in a 
degree of ignorance that we have today, we would dearly regret it. 
On the other hand, if we said today, well, I don't know what micro- 
organisms be damned, but full steam ahead, the problems that we would face 
are of a very, very different order. Now, my hope would be that what these 
guidelines would do is to, one, create a community of education and train- 
ing such as the one that I think exists in Dr. Petersdorf's laboratory, 
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