Word: caltech
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...multiplying, their scenario goes, it could find its way into human intestines and cause baffling diseases. Beyond any immediate danger, others say, there are vast unknowns and moral implications. Do not intervene in evolution, they warn in effect, because "it's not nice to fool Mother Nature." Caltech's biology chairman, Robert Sinsheimer, concludes: "Biologists have become, without wanting it, the custodians of great and terrible power. It is idle to pretend otherwise...
...concern of Caltech's Sinsheimer is partly philosophical -some might even say mystical. He fears the unpredictable consequences of breaching what he calls nature's "evolutionary barrier" between different kinds of creatures-the genetic incompatibility that in most cases prevents one species from breeding with another. In the same vein, retired Columbia Biochemist Erwin Chargaff asks: "Have we the right to counteract, irreversibly, the evolutionary wisdom of millions of years in order to satisfy the ambition and the curiosity of a few scientists...
Matthew S. Meselson, chairman of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, said yesterday he spent most of the last two weeks at Caltech in Pasadena, Calif. where he said recom- binant DNA research goes on without interference or regulation by city authorities...
Carter contended that reports about pressure on him to select one candidate or another have been "grossly exaggerated." Nonetheless, such pressure persisted, for example, in the debate over whether he should choose Caltech President Harold Brown or Schlesinger for the Pentagon...
...Carter insisted last week. In the narrowest sense that was apparently true. But the statement ignored the fact that some of Washington's sharpest political and bureaucratic infighters were flashing their knives to influence the President-elect's most difficult remaining personnel decision: whether to appoint the Caltech president to the Pentagon post or give the job back to James Schlesinger, who had been abruptly dumped by President Gerald Ford for resisting Ford's efforts to trim the defense budget...