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called them speculative benefits and imagined hazards, and that does seem to 
be the circumstance. 
I was sitting, appalled, realizing how far it is to go before you can 
really have a prokaryote happily manufacturing insulin for you, which is 
one of the imagined or speculative benefits. It certainly means that 
there is a great burden upon the NIH, it seems to me, rather than on the 
great scientific community to do it, to engage in a set of orderly studies 
which it either carries out itself or sees to it that they are conducted 
somewhere. That certainly is true with all the elements of safety. The 
studies that Dr. Rowe brought up this morning certainly were right on 
target, and those require doing. They can't be farmed out to the academic 
community, or think that they will spontaneously occur there. You have 
the facilities and the money and the people. The burden of dealing with 
the safety problems I think now lodges here very firmly. 
That, when you are done with it, will allow you to play games with 
the flexible guidelines, and I hope they remain flexible for some time. 
I guess I was personally troubled by the fact that the nay-sayers 
were so very young as compared with the aye-sayers. That must be telling 
us something, but I am not quite sure I know just what it is. In the past, 
the previous history, conservatism has been the role of elders of the tribe, 
and the last day and a half, it has been the other way around. That is 
rather remarkable, and very deeply troubling. 
In any case, I guess I do believe with respect to the guidelines 
themselves that they are a thoughtful document, and I am sure that they 
will change in due course, and that each piece of them will have to be 
taken on their own merits; and that is precisely what Bob Sinsheimer 
was saying a moment ago. I don't think one can hear debate whether any 
strain of E^_ coli is the best strain to be using in perpetuity; it 
certainly is not. 
I share all the concern with respect to what physical containment 
actually means. Things escape from physical containment no matter how 
tight the containment. I would agree that I don't understand what the 
PI containment really is, or the difference between it and the P2. If 
you are serious you will go to P3. I don't think PI and P2 contain any- 
thing at all, honestly. 
The chief difficulty in all such work is that there is not instant 
feedback for your own blunders, and if only one could arrange that some- 
how, then the problems which have long characterized work in the clinical 
microbiology laboratory would be much more easily solved. By and large, 
those of us who work with toxic chemicals got almost instant feedback. 
Either you keeled over or it stank, and you knew. In this field you just 
don't know. It has been the same problem with radiation. We have watched 
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