Should Recombinant DNA Work End?

We've had about three billion years of evolution on this planet, and it has been an exceedingly slow, and please remember, an exceedingly painful process. A lot of creatures who arose have been wiped out; there has been a lot of extinction. Things have settled down to a degree by now, just because we have lived together for so long. I'll tell you how slow evolution goes. To make the usual mutation, which means that one has changed just one amino acid in a protein, and make it become the norm for the species, takes, on the average, six million years. What we're being faced with now is the possibility not only of changing one amino acid in a protein, but of producing whole new proteins overnight across very distant boundaries. Professor Meselson just conveyed to you the idea that it happens all the time, that it's very natural--we're just speeding up a natural process. That's a lot of speeding up. One amino acid change has taken 20 million years in cytachrome C.

This is really the big issue, whether or not to turn over the products of three billion years of evolution to a group of scientists who are eager to play around with them. When I use the words "play around" I don't mean to say that they are not serious. What I mean to say is that the issue is so big that it represents a problem that has never come up in science before. Let me say now that the issue of scientific inquiry tends to come up in this connection. No one wants to interfere with the freedom of scientific inquiry. What we're worried about in this case is the means being used to answer the questions. I think that scientists must be free to ask any questions they choose, but they can't be free to endanger their fellow human beings.

There is no quarrel about whether there are hazards. Everybody knows there are hazards. It is the molecular biologists themselves who about three years ago blew the whistle on this kind of research, and for three years there has been continuous dialogue. We who are worried are constantly being told, "you're just having bad dreams." If we've just been having bad dreams, then what have they been talking about for three years?

You would be surprised to know what percentage of our infectious diseases were already on their way out before any breakthrough happened, and I'm talking of such major breakthroughs as sulfa drugs and antibiotics. They were on the way out because they had been declining for many, many years. And why? Because of better nutrition, better sanitation, better water supplies, not primarily because of basic research.

The smallpox vaccination wasn't introduced as a piece of basic research. It was introduced by seeing that dairy maids in England didn't get smallpox.

I did not bring up the question of how slowly an organism becomes a species norm with the idea that a recombinant DNA organism would become a species norm. I was just telling you how slowly these tiny 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's, I am as anxious as he to have these fundamental questions in biology answered, but as I said before, the problem is how one is going to go about answering them.

The newspapers were filled a few days ago with the news that Professor Khourana at MIT had succeeded in synthesizing a gene, and an erroneous report came out which said I considered that research dangerous. 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-old building that is absolutely infested with little red Egyptian ants. As far as I know they are ineradicable. It is the last place in the world to begin doing recombinant DNA research.

I 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.

I think that in our present state of ignorance no university, and no crowded urban center is a place for this kind of work. I think it should be segregated within one or a few national or regional laboratories. And I want a steady monitoring of the involved workers.

The 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."