145 
or saw such incidents in areas where it was prohibited. More than 80 per- 
cent did not know who the safety coordinator was. I have further examples 
which I will submit to the record tomorrow. 
I know our local unofficial committee's efforts in conjunction with 
renewed concern by the MIT administration will have a profound effect in 
changing such practice, but I think that without the active participation 
of students, technicians, laboratory assistants, custodians and even sec- 
retaries, in addition to principal investigators, many of whom are not 
regularly in the lab during the course of the day, there can be no real 
safety practice or enforcement of safety guidelines. That is, we argue 
strongly for local rank-and-file safety committees who would be able to 
lodge protest to both the institution and the funding agencies if safety 
criteria are violated. 
Finally, there is also the question of dissuasion and, if I might be 
so strong, reprisal for those who violate or wish to violate the recom- 
mended procedures. I do not wish to suggest the necessity of some kind of 
Mafia to engage in the protection business; however, without making some 
concrete proposals, the La Jolla guidelines leave everything to the 
essential goodwill of the principal investigators. 
In a time when society is recognizing the need for more stringent reg- 
ulation of environmental carcinogens and other health hazards, when the 
Occupational Safety and Health Administration is struggling to deal with 
the regulation of these agents in the workplace, we should set an example 
rather than join a past practice that has only too clearly caused unneces- 
sary illness and suffering. Thus, I think we must suggest the possibility 
of cutting the funding of health and safety violators and rejecting the 
publication of experiments that do not observe safety practice, although 
perhaps publication and public censure would be better. We believe it is 
inappropriate for the peer review process to become tied up in the ques- 
tion of evaluating safety. We do not believe peers in molecular biology 
are the best or sole judges of safety on a technical level. We would 
rather see a committee that evaluated, separately from scientific merit, 
the proposed safety features of an experiment. 
This committee, a biohazard review committee, would include — in addi- 
tion to the molecular biologists — epidemiologists, occupational hygiene 
specialists, ecologists, and others capable of evaluating of a potential 
public health hazard. I feel these people should be in the majority on 
such a committee. 
I am not opposing peer review to judge scientific merit, and hope- 
fully such a biohazard committee would function more to educate the inves- 
tigator rather than to censure her or him. However, I would urge you to 
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