167 
DR. ROWE: I even promise to behave myself. 
(Laughter. ) 
I wanted to try to get a little different perspective to some of the 
risk problems that I see. First, I think one very important thing to recog- 
nize is that these guidelines are hopefully very temporary structures. 
Asilomar was a step, these guidelines are a start up a little bit, and 
mostly based on the fact that we really don't know much about what the 
risks are and what might happen. 
But I would like to get across one feeling I had yesterday, which was 
that very little attention was paid to the reality of these risks. They 
were always referred to as theoretical, potential, and I don't think they 
are really that distant. I think the important logical step to put across 
is that one can very readily envision deliberately creating the most hor- 
rendous micro-organisms by means of this technology. I am sure that the BW 
workers are hard to work putting everything into — or at least making sce- 
narios where they would put all kinds of harmful toxogenic and antibiotic 
resistant genes into _E. coli . One could do it deliberately, therefore the 
possibilities exist that one could do it accidentally. I think those are 
real. 
One minor scenario is that everyone agrees that it would be totally 
irresponsible to put botulinus toxin gene into IS. coli . One can move back 
from that by degrees. It would be equally negligent to put Clostridium 
botulinus shotgunned DNA into _E. coli . It would be equally — well, one 
point of background. Botulinus toxin is not basically a bacterial func- 
tion. It is equally a phage, a virus function. The virus carries the genes 
for this toxin from one botulinus strain to another, and makes it a toxino- 
genic strain. Therefore you should never take a gene pulled from botulinus 
phages and put it into E^. coli . You would wind up with the same results. 
Conversely, or additionally, you should never take phages that you 
don't really know much about and put their genes into JE. coli , because you 
might well have an analogous system. It is not just botulinus, it is diph- 
theria toxin, streptococci, and I believe other clostridial toxins that are 
under phage control. 
Putting phage genes into _E. coli could well create a toxinogenic 
E.* coli that is not anaerobic, that doesn't need just badly canned beans in 
order to get to us. It could be all over. I think these risks are very 
real. I think they are very minor. Of all the possible DNAs that can go 
into _E. coli in the course of experiments, a tiny, tiny fraction will 
actually be dangerous. We could name a few, and I think that is important, 
and we can't name those that are absolutely not dangerous. 
[ 308 ] 
