April 21, 1976 
the 
evergreen 
state„ 
college 
olympia w 
Washington 
98b05 
Dr. Donald S. Fredrickson, Director 
National Institutes o£ Health 
Building 1, Room 124 
Bethesda, Maryland 20014 
Dear Dr. Fredrickson, 
First, let me complement you on the whole way you have handled the Re- 
combinant DNA guidelines. Your approach has been thorough and responsible, 
really giving a sense of listening to a variety of views. I can see that 
the delays to date, while undesirable, have been unavoidable. 
There is one major issue to which I feel we as a committee have not 
addressed ourselves adequately, which was brought up by several of your 
correspondents. This is the question of proliferation of sites where such 
research is done, particularly of P3 and P4 facilities. Since fall, it has 
been apparent that this is a problem, and Emmett Barkley, Wally Rowe and 
I have been discussing the possibility of having a few national P3 and 
P4 facilities openly available. Most non-committee scientists to whom I have 
broached the idea like it, from Joshua Lederberg to scientists in many major 
universities to Rich Goldstein. This appears to be more an administrative 
policy decision than one which our committee would need to incorporate into 
guidelines. 
I see many advantages of working in regional centers; at least for P3 
and P4 experiments. For example: (a) It would be less expensive to 
construct and staff a few such regional centers than a proliferation of local 
ones, (b) The primary responsibility of the staff would be conducting 
potentially hazardous experiments, and they could be trained and tested much 
more carefully on the techniques than could a graduate student or technician 
for whom the actual cloning is only one small, rather technical part of a 
long-range problem, (c) the technology would then be much more uniformly 
accessible to qualified investigators from a variety of institutions, large 
and small, tending less to artificially create an ’'elite” - a major concern 
of Dr. Lederberg’ s. (d) It would be far easier to make sure that such 
facilities were not in vermin infested buildings; in buildings dealing with 
patient care; near heavily- traveled corridors; etc. (e) Each organism of 
major interest could be ’’shotgun" - cloned one or a few times, with banks 
of clones maintained to be selected out by individual investigators, rather 
than having each "shotgun” experiment repeated hundreds of times, (f) The 
sites could be chosen slightly away from population centers, as at Ft. 
Detrick, to minimize the possibility of damaging law suits from people who 
think nearby recombinant DNA might be the cause of their ailments, (g) People 
selecting their clones in such facilities could be properly trained in the 
process in safe techniques for dealing with their purified clones at home. 
(h) It would be far easier then to be sure that one still had the proper 
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