159 
Okay, the third point is that we believe very strongly that there 
should be broad-based monitoring committees formed. This is both at the 
institutional level and at the Federal level, and also I can add something 
else that Marjorie Shaw suggested yesterday, and that is that some type of 
informed consent forms for all the workers who are involved in this work 
should be sent out. 
And then, of course, there is the problem of informed consent of the 
public. But I think that is the role that this committee is playing. I 
think you are a living informed consent form. You represent the public. 
Now, there are loopholes, and I will just pick two of them, because 
they are technical. There is the issue which Don Brown raised yesterday, 
and I agree with, which is 99 percent purity. What is 99 percent purity? 
To a biochemist that is pretty pure. To a geneticist that is another 
question. 
Now, the La Jolla guidelines state that if one can show that 99 percent 
is obtained with some material, the containment EK, that is the biological, 
and the P containment, the physical level, will soon be dropped. They can 
be lowered. 
Now, there is something strange about that because no one can define 
purity. What is 99 percent purity? How can it be confirmed? What are 
the criteria that are going to be used? 
Quite obviously, from the discussion that went on yesterday, that issue 
is not defined in any way. 
9 
Now, I will give you an example. Everyone gets snowed by numbers, 10 , 
that is^a lot of zeroes. But if you have one percent contamination, you 
have 10 , and that is a lot of zeroes also. 
Another loophole in the guidelines that we saw is somehow embryonic 
tissues were differentiated from other types of vertebrate tissues, and I 
think that is rather foolish. Embryonic tissues are almost impossible to 
remove from the follicle cells that they are obtained from. 
Okay, now there is — I would like to answer — Dr. Berg asked a very rea- 
sonable question, what do I mean by banning. That is a rather harsh term, 
and I think it deserves an answer. To me it means delaying, and when we 
suggested experiments should be banned or delayed, what we meant was that 
they should be delayed until meaningful biological experiments can be done 
that prove that these experiments are not hazardous. We are not saying they 
shouldn't be done, but we are saying that there should be a basis for doing 
them, and some certainty about the hazards involved. There are techniques, 
I mean, in the whole cancer field. There are basic techniques in carcinogen 
testing, and the theory is that you give the largest dose for the longest 
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