DNA: There is Time to Think

THE CAMBRIDGE EXPERIMENTATION REVIEW BOARD is currently weighing the benefits and costs of allowing Harvard and MIT to proceed with potentially dangerous genetic research. That research involves forming new organisms by artificially combining strands of DNA.

Those in favor of this recombinant DNA research emphasize its potential benefits including the ability for plants to fix nitrogen, the potential for finding out more about cancer cells and the development of cheaper ways to make insulin. They claim that the review board should recommend that the Cambridge City Council lift its ban on the research enacted this summer and allow the work to be done under federal guidelines released earlier this year.

Before the review board makes such a decision it should consider the strong arguments against lifting the ban. There are two important reasons why the moratorium should continue: there is the possibility of biohazards occurring, including the danger that the bacteria, once transplanted with foreign DNA, could induce disease and death in humans, and there is the far greater danger that scientists will conduct experiments in genetic engineering.

When Harvard originally proposed to do the research it made the imprudent decision to place the laboratory in the Bio Labs, an antiquated facility which is infested with ants. The poor choice of structures greatly enhances the chance that the organisms could escape, possibly infecting those who work in the lab and nearby residents. Scientists have assured the Harvard community that such mistakes probably won't happen and, even if they do, that the possibilities of disease are slim. But no one has been able to give a 100 per cent guarantee that these biohazards won't occur.

Although many of Harvard's biologists and biochemists, as well as scientists as the National Institutes of Health, are sure there is almost no potential for danger, there are experts in the field, most notably Robert Sinsheimer, chairman of the Biology Department at Cal Tech, who believe that biodisasters could occur. In an interview in Science Magazine Sinsheimer cites the possibility that, by endowing lower organisms with the DNA of upper organisms, a "sort of betrayal of state secrets at the molecular level may occur." These new organisms may be endowed with dangerous, possibly lethal characteristics that scientists may not be able to combat.

BUT OF FAR GREATER CONCERN than the potential biohazards of the experimentation are the serious ethical questions that should be asked about DNA research. This type of experimentation gives scientists the capability to alter life fundamentally. Scientists would be able to intervene into the evolutionary process and create new forms of life. Individual scientists should not be entrusted with such powerful tools.

It is unfortunate that these ethical questions were not debated at Harvard. Such a debate would have gone far toward making science more accountable to the public's needs on this particular issue. But the opportunity has not yet been lost. The Cambridge Experimentation Review Board should recommend that there be a debate held on the federal level about the ethics of recombinant DNA and genetic engineering. At the same time the council should vote that all research should be conducted at a single site, such as Fort Detrick, the former biological warfare laboratory, for several years so the results of the experimentation can be observed without high risk. The scientists' experiments should be open to public scrutiny, and the goals of the researchers arrived at by public debate.

In the 1940's when the United States was frantically racing to develop the atomic bomb, there was no time to debate the risks of nuclear power. We are now faced with experimentation that could have the same drastic consequences, but the situation is far different. There is time to discuss and evaluate. The Cambridge Review Board should not throw that time away.