Word: lear
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Lear pegs 1971 as the year when scientists began to question the safety of certain kinds of recombinant DNA research. As a result of a few scientists' conscientious probing, researchers gathered for a series of conferences in which they discussed the potential hazards of gene-splicing. Slowly and increasingly acrimoniously,they drew up guidelines recommending a voluntary moratorium on certain kinds of recombinant DNA research and setting up standards for physical and biological safety precautions for investigators to observe in different categories of experiments. These conferences proved the basis for the 1976 National Institutes of Health (NIH) guidelines. Since...
However, as Lear convincingly shows, the scientists' attitudes towards the public marred the apparent nobility of the discussions. Most of these conferences remained either closed to the press or operated with unusual rules of confidentiality which served to inhibit public discussion and understanding of recombinant DNA research. Moreover, many scientists did not even consider the public's right to have input to regulating research that could cause them harm. Dissenting scientists, those who questioned most closely the hazards of such research, were not invited to the conferences...
Events in Cambridge and at Harvard in late 1976 and 1977 demonstrated all too clearly the folly of the scientists' oversight. Lear describes the controversy that pitted Harvard scientists and administrators against the Cambridge City Council as originating with Harvard's proposal for a new special containment laboratory which would conform to the new NIH guidelines -- the same lab scheduled to open here in a few days. At a hostile and emotional City Council meeting, the scientists confronted the Cambridge community. After the dust settled, the council imposed a three-month moratorium on all recombinant DNA research in Cambridge while...
...Cambridge confrontation shocked scientists -- especially Harvard ones -- into protecting what they saw as an infringement on academic freedom of inquiry. As Lear documents, however, the scientists used questionable methods in their concern to preven "housewives," as they put it, from interfering with their work...
These actions were prompted by an understandable fear of serious interference in scientific research. However, Lear pinpoints a contradiction in many scientists' stand against regulation: these same scientists stand to profit considerably from their research through shares in corporations they set up to market their research. More fundamentally, scientists used their considerable lobbying influence to circumvent the principle that the people who pay for their experiments have a right to be protected from harm and to contribute to the decision-making process...