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After two years of grinding human brains from transmissible virus 
dementias, I developed an intense personal interest in biosafety, especially 
since it takes probably 4 to 20 years to determine whether I am going to 
come down with my own slow virus dementia. 
I think that people both in and out of the scientific community owe 
a debt of gratitude and perhaps much more to the members of the original 
committee for having the courage to call this moratorium, and I think that 
the period has been very healthy for science. 
However, there have been a lot of polarities of view, and at certain 
points it seemed that the dialogue that was going on had almost ceased, and 
I think there is a great danger in this. I think the danger is that it will 
lead to a lack of moderating influences on a particular event. So I would 
strongly urge that we keep communication channels open, especially between 
divergent groups, and perhaps even have these channels formalized through 
NIH and have meetings such as today's if people can survive them this long. 
My specific concerns about the guidelines again are meant to be con- 
structive. Containment guidelines for the shotgun experiments for different 
classes of animals are uneven. We are only dealing with hypothetical 
hazards, but there is no way of judging whether or not shotgunning inverte- 
brate DNA is any less risky than shotgunning non-human primate DNA. 
With regard to the cold-blooded vertebrates, they can be shotgunned 
with EK2 plus P2, and embryonic tissue from cold-blooded vertebrates can 
be shotgunned using EK1 plus P2. 
Now, the proposed dangers of recombinants using embryonic tissue seems 
to me to be equal to the dangers of using adult tissue, especially with 
regard to oncogenes, hormones, and enzymes. I would think that maximum 
potential risk should be assumed until we have some evidence to the con- 
trary, and I would urge that all shotgun experiments be considered of 
equal risk. I would urge the committee to adopt a very conservative atti- 
tude as to what the confinement should be. 
I would like to make some comments and add some data about physical 
containment. I don't think we should put too much reliance on physical 
containment, and I don't think we should rely on anecdotal reporting of 
laboratory safety. The fact is that most labs have not and do not follow 
their personnel. Reviewing the data in the literature, PI and P2 
physical containment do not provide probably any significant protection. 
P3 containment involving laminar flow hoods is also far from fool-proof, 
and there have been seroconversions to SV40 in P3 labs. At least one 
third of the 5,000 laboratory-acquired infections in the last 30 years 
have occurred in P3 facilities. This data comes from Science in 
December of last year. I know that number, 5,000, is a little different 
from the number we heard today. 
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