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DR. FREDRICKSON: Well, in effect I did. 
DR. SINGER: In terms of just responding to one of the points that 
Dr. Brown made, which is the question of the flexibility that is built 
into the guidelines in regard to physical containment. The guidelines 
specifically recognize the very miniaturization procedures that you 
describe. 
DR. BROWN: They state it and then they do nothing with it. 
DR. SINGER: No. 
DR. BROWN: Then how does it affect the guidelines, Maxine? 
DR. SINGER: It affects it in the following way. Let me put it the 
way I was going to put it. 
First of all, on page 3, at the end of the introduction, the guidelines 
recognized that there will be new and special procedures which will allow 
experiments "to be carrier out under different conditions than indicated 
here without sacrifice of safety ." And then again, on the botton of page 6, 
at the end of the discussion of physical containment, it specifically recog- 
nizes the procedures developed in Dave Hogness' lab as offering a new pro- 
cedure that allows the containment of recombinant DNA-containing organisms. 
I think those two recognitions, specific recognitions, coupled with the fact 
that the guidelines are required to be reconsidered at a least yearly inter- 
vals, seems to me at least to suggest that the committee was aware that such 
new procedures that offered new ways for containment are being developed and 
present useful and important alternatives to the specific procedures that 
are in here. 
So I just really meant to point out that I think in some sense the 
guidelines respond to this. 
DR. BROWN: The guidelines say that here is a new method which may be 
useful, but it does not give any reduction in stringency because of the 
existence of this new methodology. I would like to see written in the 
guidelines that you could bring everything down one notch in physical or EK 
containment if this particular type of methodology is used. 
DR. SINGER: At the bottom of page 6, there is the following statement, 
"Thus, such procedures should reduce the need for the standard types of 
physical containment." 
As you know, I am not on the advisory committee, but I was at a number 
of their meetings, and certainly in terms of the discussion that went into 
that paragraph and that sentence, I think there was very much in mind 
exactly the point that you made. 
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