Word: geneticists
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...most important reason that most geneticists and molecular biologists now oppose the legislation is a growing conviction, based on continued experiments, that current recombinant DNA research is safe. Some strains of E. coli normally reside in billions in the human intestine, a fact that encouraged the fear that new laboratory forms would spread like the plague among human beings. But research has shown that E. coli K12, which traces its ancestry to bacteria taken from a human patient at Stanford University in 1922, altered genetically during its life in the labs; among other changes, it can no longer colonize...
...along with the impending federal legislation, which is expected to impose restraints on all researchers-including those at previously unregulated industry labs. Still, scientists remain concerned over any political controls on their work. At last week's Senate hearing, these fears were voiced by Norton Zinder, a molecular geneticist at Rockefeller University. Said he: "We are moving into a precedent-making area -the regulation of an area of scientific research-and I must plead that this be done with extreme care and without haste. The record of past attempts of authoritative bodies, either church or state, to control intellectual...
Laboratories can be designed to prevent the escape of potentially dangerous organisms. But there is always the chance that something or someone will fail-and that a few virulent bugs will slip through the safeguards to multiply in the outside world. Faced with this problem at the Asilomar conference. Geneticist Roy Curtiss III proposed an ingenious solution: Why not convert the standard genetic research organism, a strain of the E. coli bacterium, into a seriously weakened mutant variety that would quickly self-destruct if it escaped the laboratory? Curtiss volunteered to engineer the new bug, and his colleagues agreed...
...early 1960s, Lysenko found a new patron in Nikita Khrushchev, who was desperately eager to overtake American agriculture. But Lysenko's star was already dimming. From the West came word of spectacular new advances in genetics. Lysenko's reputation was also undermined by Soviet geneticist Zhores Medvedev's samizdat (underground book) The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko, which documented Lysenko's falsification of data and character assassination. Finally, when Khrushchev fell -in part because of his disastrous farm policies-so did Lysenko. The onetime czar of Soviet agriculture spent his declining years at a research...
...impact on American psychologists who believe that heredity is crucial to intelligence; they have produced several twin studies similar to Burt's. Says Herrnstein, "I know of no correlation of Burt's which is seriously challenged in the literature." But Harvard's Richard Lewontin, a population geneticist, says that Burt's work with twins "is the only large study which is methodologically correct, so its loss is no trivial problem for the heritability people. It is also not nice for them to have this mess in their backyard...