Word: nih
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Gall contrasted the tone of Monday's meeting with the situation at Harvard which he said is "blown out of all proportion." He said the danger of creating a new disease is almost zero if the NIH prohibitions on work with pathogenic, oncogenic, toxic and drug resistant bacterial strains are respected...
...changes occur in genes, and hence in the proteins that genes direct the synthesis of, and contrasting that with the fact that whole genes and blocks of genes can be transposed by these new methods. Everyone realizes our state of almost complete ignorance, which was expressed beautifully by the NIH guidelines, which state, "At present the hazards may be guessed at, speculated about, or voted on, but they can not be known absolutely in the absence of firm experimental data, and unfortunately, the needed data were more often than not unavailable. As a scientist and a colleague of Matt Meselson...
...Professor Khourana was working very carefully to avoid the kind of dangers that we're talking about, but he took nine years to make that gene. What we're talking abdout here is the transposing of whole blocks of genes at any time overnight. I said before that the NIH is trying very hard to set reasonable guidelines. Many of those guidelines I believe will not be enforced, and indeed can not be enforced. I'll give you an example. Every level of so-called containment asks for insect and rodent control. Matt and I work in a 50 year...
...want to say a second thing about containment. That is that both the NIH guidelines and a recent environmental impact draft--and indeed virtually all my colleagues in the biology department of Harvard--assure us that the principal source of contamination would be the workers moving around...
...Weedham Report, prepared at the request of the NIH, found that there have been 423 infections and three deaths in the last 25 years of operation under the most careful containment conditions at the Fort Detrick labs for study of viruses. Weedham concluded in his reports, "In the absence of effective vaccination, it is impossible to do basic research on a highly infective agent without laboratory infections...