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Containment facilities for such research are springing up around the country, specially designed under guidelines specified by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which set out in 1975 to prevent disasters that might occur if some of the research material should escape from the laboratories. Within two months, P-3 containment facilities for recombinant DNA research on the fourth floor of the Biological Laboratories will be ready for safety inspection. At about the same time these labs will be undergoing investigation, two even more sophisticated laboratories in Bethesda, Md., and Fort Dixon, Texas, idle since biological warfare research was banned...
...controversy over recombinant DNA began in 1974 when scientists working in the field initiated a self-imposed moratorium on their research after they discovered they were working with potentially hazardous material. Since that time, review committees at the NIH have established the national guidelines to permit the kind of research which scientists hope will bring cures for cancer and for solving nutritional problems. Owing to the vastness of the field, however, the expectations are unlimited...
...even further than the angry words expressed here last spring. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy '54 (D-Mass.) withdrew his name last month from a bill he introduced last April which would have imposed severe penalties--up to $10,000 a day for experimentation performed which did not conform to NIH guidelines--under pressure from a number of scientific committees that paid him a visit in Washington. "That first bill excited resistance among the governing board of the American Scientists Committee of Microbiology," says DeWitt Stetton '30, deputy director of science at NIH. Stetton adds that the bill did not receive...
...whole, Washington's anxieties about recombinant DNA research have subsided somewhat in recent months, and NIH is preparing a revision of its original 1975 guidelines adopted at the Apilomar, Cal., conference. The revisions discussed last June at an NIH-sponsored conference in Falmouth, Mass., mostly include specific cases of DNA research which originally were classified to be performed in stricter containment facilities. "We initially over-reacted to the severe anxiety surrounding the issue," Stetton says, adding that the NIH review committee has significantly shifted its position. Quoting Mark Twain, who once said that the most dangerous thing we could...
...additional risk when scientists become convinced that their experiments' potential for ill effect is relatively small. They become casual and careless, discarding safety in the interest of efficiency. The September 30, 1977 issue of Science reported that this type of attitude has already led to a breach of the NIH safety rules. Out of either carelessness or intentional neglect researchers in the biochemistry and biophysics departments of the University of California at San Francisco used a noncertified biological component and failed to record its use in the official logbook...