138 
Now, I want to give you some specific ways which I believe that these 
guidelines could be made very strict in containment, far stricter than I 
frankly believe is legitimate, and still be flexible, because you do 
realize how rigid these guidelines are. 
The word "guidelines," by the way, is a terrible word for this. 
These are not guidelines. These are rules. Rigid rules. EK2 doesn't 
exist, therefore these experiments are out. Let's not talk about guide- 
lines. These are rules. 
Let me give you one example of how the manner in which an experiment 
is done might be considered. It is now possible, courtesy of Dave Hogness 
and his collaborators, to shotgun DNA, put it on plates, and never ever 
have a liquid colony of those potential hazards. That is to say the DNA 
recombinants that you don't want will never go beyond about 10^. That 
is the concentration of one colony on a plate, no liquid cultures, no 
nothing. All of the final steps of selection are done just on that plate 
and nowhere else. No liquid cultures. There is no pipetting, so you 
can't even ingest the stuff. 
Now, it seems to me that the manner of experimentation should have 
been considered in these guidelines. There are safe ways of doing it. 
You can't even take these eukaryotic DNAs and go to Fort Detrick in these 
P4 containment rooms, have some very well-trained assistant do the shotgun 
procedures for you, select on plates, the way I just said, the colony that 
you want, and take it back to your laboratory, because it is illegal. 
That is to say, they are so totally inflexible — these rules are, and you 
can't even use P4-containment rules in their present way. 
Now, that is the first thing and I probably used most of my time up 
but I would like to agree with the previous speaker that there is a certain 
civics lesson to have been gained from the way in which these decisons were 
made. We happen to — our final conclusions are different, but the general 
principles to begin with are the same. 
It seems to me that the present committee, the NIH guideline committee, 
and before it the Asilomar committee, were really handicapped because of 
this self-serving issue. What happened was that when scientists brought 
up the issue of potential danger, an issue which was singularly singled 
out free of all other issues, and put out, when they brought it up they 
got some points. But when they tried to control it, that is when the 
trouble began. 
I would like to suggest that perhaps a useful thing for this committee 
to think about is the way in which a completely objective — a committee which 
cannot be accused of self-serving, a committee which does not have members 
whose minds are made up in either direction ahead of time — can be formed, 
[279] 
