187 
example, where young people could apply and the committee could decide 
which would have the best priority and should be done, and that these 
would be available to scientists who don't have as prestigious support 
of a major institution with funds that can be put into building these. 
Because in the long run, the compliance in this country with the rules 
and with the guidelines is going to depend on the image, I think, much 
more than the actual guidelines per se. 
DR. FREDRICKSON: Dr. Zaitlin? 
DR. ZAITLIN: Well, as with others before me, I have been scratching 
out things that I was going to say, but I feel as the only plant scientist 
on the committee, I can address a few remarks to that. Now, plants are 
certainly to be concerned with, and there are some rules in the guidelines 
concerning plants, but I would submit that you probably had a minimal input 
with respect to plant work. Now, NIH normally has not been a heavy sup- 
porter of plant work, but other agencies which will follow these guidelines 
if they are adopted certainly will. 
I am not talking about situations where plant DNA is incorporated 
into bacteria. These situations are already covered quite well by the 
guidelines, but I am talking about those situations where foreign DNA 
of various origins ultimately will get incorporated into the genome of 
higher plants. 
Now, the guidelines specify conditions for the containment of cul- 
tures, of cells, organelles, of plants parts during their treatment, and 
they also state that cloned DNA used in these experiments should be tested 
to determine their effects on these plants or plant parts. 
Now, containment here I think is an easy situation. We are talking 
about organisms or organelles which, with much lower replication rates, 
they don't form aerosols, and the cultures are very fastidious in their 
nutrient requirements. 
My concern, rather, relates to what controls are necessary once we 
have obtained plants with the modified genome containing the desired 
characteristics. I should add parenthetically that we are certainly a 
long way from that goal. We need procedures, an outline of procedures 
to determine if in addition to the introduction of the desirable charac- 
teristics, we inadvertently have created an organism with undesirable 
characteristics . 
I feel, therefore, that we need to include in the guidelines restric- 
tions on the release of these plants from controlled greenhouse or control- 
led growth conditions until they can be adequately tested through several 
generations. Two specific properties come to mind. 
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