0046C

RECOMBINANT REFLECTIONS

[Being diary notes written in late December, 1977
in the Ober Engadine (St. Moritz), reflecting upon
the NIH Director's Advisor's Committee Meeting on
the revision of the Recombinant DNA Guidelines,
a gathering that had taken place earlier that month.]

  We rolled into St. Moritz for our winter sojourn on the evening
of December 20 [1977]. The presumption from the disquieting lack of
whiteness on the right-of way of the narrow guage Rhaetsian Bahn was
confirmed by the taxi-driver at the Bahnhof.  "Ya, wenig Scbnee. 1'
Up on Corvilgia we could make out strips of brown grass mixed with
the white.  Next day the runs above the dorf proved unusable, a
.
mixture of snow, grass and rock.  One good run on the slopes of the
"black" piste at Marguns was good until the Club Mediteranee
discovered it.  The next day gulps of skiers disgorged from the
lifts, and this precious surface too was soon gone. . .

  Woke at 1:45 on the morning of the 21st. A vivid and complex
dream lay before me like sand from which the sea of unconsciousness
had suddenly fallen back.  It was a re-running in my mind of the DNA
hearing of the 15th and 16th [of December], in the style of Stoppard
or Moliere.  I regret not having risen at once to write down what I
remembered.  The clarity faded slowly as the sea returned. The next
morning enough fragments remained for me to attempt some recall.

  There was a female narrator, speaking in the lines of Hesse,
Goethe and Nabokov.  She was describing nets of containments for
organisms no longer presumed innocent until shown to be guilty of
mis-using a fragment of some foreign genome.  The narrator's voice
was overlaid by that of another , pointing out the recklessness of
human meddling and its often unsettling, usually dangerous
consequences.  The Title of "A Genetic Vessel" seemed to suggest
itself to the sleeping audience of one.

  To some of us, certainly to me, this, one of several hearings on
the revision of the NIH Guidelines was the ultimate in morality
Plays, the roles drawn so starkly as to be farce--the
representatives of the environmentalists, oblivious to the substance
of the proposed revisions, clinging to the procedural, which they
consummately exploit with waves of disruption. . . the scientists on
the Recombinant Advisory Committee, almost glowing angelically in
their well-scrubbed candor and sanity, fascinated and appalled by
the behavior of their antagonists.  The Director's Advisor's
Committee, jury, prosecutors and defenders, superbly balanced in all
the biases, a watch whose inertias were almost too evenly
distributed to allow it to tick.


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     The chairman, by now become a virtuoso director of such
ensembles, struggled to create some opportunity for movement, both
rational and political, yet mindful that impatience and biting
cynicism must not leave teeth-marks on the precious record.   It had
been made clear at the first such hearing by the roar of Judge
Baselon, that the "record must hang out, warts and all" for possible
airing at the bar.

   The stars were out.  Watson, of the first magnitude, in both
reputation and now, silliness, as he makes his dramatic `apology'
for `starting it all [by calling for guidelines at Asilomar]; now
much too late to melt the giant snowball of anxieties collecting in
the storm that followed.  Yet despite the wild eyes, the dreadful
hair, the childish stammer, Watson was curiously effective. One had
to admit that by now we all knew deep in our hearts that the truly
dreadful things imagined might result had learned a thousand years
ago that their limited adaptations would never gave them the free
run of the earth.  Now they were sleeping in tubes, at the command
of their human conquerors.  The humans in turn were less wise than
wily Nature, which had experimented with recombination of genomes
for millenia and grown tired of trying to exceed the limitations of
survival programmed by the Creator.

  Still it was utterly human to imagine, with a shiver, that the
`power' might be more than we knew how to handle, something cosmic,
unique.  The laws of thermodynamics were beyond repeal.  But every
theater wanted its extravaganza.  Maybe biology could create just
one perpetuum mobile.

  A second star, less light, more heat. John Tooze, choleric
representative of EMBO, ESF, etc., scolds us Americans for our
Puritan bondage to guidelines, constructed in a Napoleanic code
instead of our heritage of common law, and scoffs at our fear of
NEPA-covered law suits.  He sputtered at the injuction sought by one
Frederick citizen named Mack (suing in the name of his young son
whom he presumably would also enjoin from riding in motor cars,
breathing hydrocarbons in the air over route 495 or coming close to
any other dangers, except his father's mind.)

   The chairman seized the dramatic effect of this peroration,
nailing it tight under his gavel,  and declared recess to relieve the
natural tensions of bladder, anxiety, thirst.  Old Hans Stetten
muttered that the flag of NIH should be at half-mast.  America could
not let herself be less careful, less involved in regulations, less
egalitarian, of course.  But could America afford to be less
successful, and give up the lead in new discoveries to ever more
aggressive competitors?

  "Let us, ladies and gentlemen of the Committee, go once again
around the table to capture the kernals of your wisdom.  What are
the thoughts that you wish the recorder to preserve as your measured
conclusions, to be the sound-track to your image which the MIT
archivist is even now imprinting on his colored tape?"


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  "Ms. Menard, research technician (or research assistant,
colleague-person, member of an IRB); your words will be the first
you have spoken at this meeting.  What say you to the molecular
biologists who order you to wash their genomes, clone the progeny,
disinfect the recombinants? Unlike most of the learned or unlearned
commentators, the scrupulous, the zealots, the philosophers, the
unselfish, the egotistical and the bemused--you, Ms. Menard will
know something about what you are saying. You will return to your
laboratory, you say, and continue to expose yourself to
recombinants.  I dare say you have today been exposed to stranger
recombinations in Bethesda than nest in your incubators in Seattle.

  Mr. Beatty-- student member of an IRB in Corvallis, Oregon, a
state so environmentalist that it discourages immigration-- You have
seen the flaring nostrils of Mr. Dach of the Envirnmental Defense
Fund, heard the monotonous chant of Ms. Pfund (Sierra Club),
wondered at Ms. Simring (Friends of the Earth). Are you impressed
by the phantoms they have seen at dusk? Not apparently.

  James Neal--with your fiercely bearded Winslow Homer face,
dealer in eukaryote organisms that grow up and go to school,  expert
in higher primate genes.  You have listened many times to your Ann
Arbor colleagues before this meeting.  To fey Ms. Susan Wright who
is here acting in her life story (the Chair has begun to grow fond
of her myopia); to Dr. Arthur Schwartz (the Chair has grown tired of
hearing again about the atomic plant and the probability
calculations). You do not deny he is brilliant, but you too have
grown tired of his litany.  So it seems has Schwartz, for he has sat
out one of his allotted 5 minute periods.  He at least is capable of
feeling ennui.  You are concerned, say you Dr. Neal, about other
unseen tricks of recombination, the `tip of the iceberg'.  Agreed,
Jim, we who struggle with a mixture of confusing science, NEPA, the
F.A.P.A, the F.A.C.A, the House, the Senate, the NIH and the
Interagency Committees, could be missing somethings beneath the
surface.

  Mr. Dennis Helms, Assistant D.A., Trenton. N.J., lawyer son of
recent ambassador to Iran and prior head of C.I.A., you seem
refreshingly sane.  The vital discrepancies between the ways America
and Europe accept these new technologies disturb you.  It has also
occurred to others.  This is your first exposure to the experts
among the expert.  I hope you are not too shaken, or bitterly
disappointed. You would revise, and drastically downward.

  Dr. Mario Molina, famed pessimist of the ozone layer, slayer of
aerosol cans, Chicano, chemist, quiet earnest person.  You will find
yourself on many ethnically balanced advisory groups after your
walk-on performance here.  You ask for reassurances about [E. coli]
K-12.  Harmless, Dr. Molina, buckets of the strain have seeped
between the floors of the Rockefeller Institute, tons of it have
risen in aerosols from Sharples centrifuges.  You seem to be getting


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your bearings in this crazy biologist's dilemma.  I agree with you,
Dr. Molina, downward revision, a steep decline in conditions placed
on experiements.  You are refreshingly ingenuous about `process',
the key cleanser in the legislative toilet; yes, perhaps there is a
relationship of it to an annual law-school output in the thousands.

  Doctor, lawyer, Marjorie Shaw, temporarily a dean, a flower of
Texas, I shall carry your remarks to the end of this episode and
beyond : "We have a dead body [the Guidelines] and we can't bury it."

  Seated next to her is Dr. Karim Abmed, staff-scientist of the
Environmental Research Defense Fund--astute, yet steeped more in
process than the gene, one who will limit his talk to the method of
revision, for you are not going to waste an Arab's wisdom on
Talmudic details concerning the bloody substance of the issues.
Scientific facts are dangerous, each new study laps at the feet of
the dragon carved in sand.

  Peter Hutt, Mr. Regulatory Statute, late of F.D.A., now on a
different schedule of compensation at Covington and Burling. You
were the star of the last hearing; now you sit polishing your
advocate's skills, teasing out the folly from statements of public
and invited witnesses alike.  Now what's this, Peter, returning to
your favorite substitute for Congressional action, are you, to
Section 361 of the Public Health Service Act, those emergency powers
of the service to stamp out the menace of pestilence that you try to
make us use against hypothetical dangers!  Surely, Mr. Hutt, the
nation's laboratories are not the Campbell Soup Company.  Yes, it is
also true,  as you say, that a few F.D.A. lawyers let loose on the
Guidelines could `clean up' our regulatory errors in an afternoon.
How many years do you think it would take us to come back from the
regulatory wars, the civilian business of laboratory research beyond
our capabilities.  Why do you think we have made those "regulatory
errors in the first place?   Thank you, nevertheless, Mr. Hutt for
filling a chair in Conference Room 6 with one less fool.

  Ms. Simring rises to complain that the final Environmental
Impact Statement is not responsive to "all the comments. There is,
for example, no references to [N.Y's Atty General] Mr. Louis
Lefkowitz" brilliant analysis" of recombination. Ms.        , the
dazzling blonde lawyer who prepared the brief, and presumably is
responsible for the glaring scientific errors therein, is with us.
Perhaps she can show you our references to these, Ms. Simring.   And
could you provide us with a record of the comments not commented
upon, Ms. Simring.

   Chancellor Robert Sinsheimer - your visage is gray, your brow
more furrowed than at the last hearing.  As the lone dissident whose
peers respect, even as they suspect your motives, because you are an
excellent scientist, and academician.  God knows how valuable you
are, for we have had to search far and wide for respectable
opposition in this wearying charade.  (Something less flawed that
the Jonathon Kings, the George Walds, the Liebe Cavalieris) Do not
these other witnesses we have invited to swell out the


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opposition--from the FOE, the EDF, the AFL-CIO, the Canadian
Broadcasting Co., from Ann Arbor, not grate on your nerves? Your
rights to pessimism are unassailed (for none accuse you of the
desperate buffoonery of Wald, the acid grief of Chargaff). Yet
time, Bob, is against you, and the evidence for danger stubbornly
elusive.

  Dr. David Suzuki, brought from Vancouver to provide another
source of concern from a reputable scientist, now reveals to us that
he opposes recombinant technology because of the crimes of the
Occidental majority against the Nisei in World War II.

  Ms. Wright, lawyer, Associate Professor, member of the Committee
for Human Rights, you take umbrage at the elite establishments and
demand that the committees have the requisite complement of public
members.  Yours are rightfully earned positions, for you are black,
bright, beautiful, talented and no token member of anything. Why
should you try to help to bail the biologists out of their dilemma?
You can stand on due process.  What does it matter to you if the
Federal Administrative Practice Act plays before empty houses for 18
months before one bacterium or DNA deemed harmless is eventually
added to the list of exemptions?  You've inherited enough ego-damage
to a proud people to be be naturally suspicious.  (Have I
consciously been avoiding use of that word `self-righteous' here?)

  Sir John Kendrew, of the Nobel Prize and EMBO--Europe's NIH for
molecular biology--you are urbane and defend our national caution,
your upbringing makes rudeness awkward. Yet better than the violent
Tooze, you have carried a note of concern closer to the dissenter's
hearts.  Yes, America is being too extreme.

  Walter Rosenblith, Provost and Professor, your voice shows
annoyance and your usual impeturbability have disappeared. The
steps of containment seem less than rational to you.  Your sense of
liminal steps is offended at this sloppy scaling. Walter, does it
matter, we cry, but you don't choose to hear.  You are now adding
fuel to the fire the environmentalists are lighting to boil us in
the hot oil of Process.

  Finally, we have ascended to the Augustinian.   Professor of
Theological Ethics Gustafson of the University of Chicago. What are
theological ethics, Professor? In your swift response, the
congregation is deftly dissected into the hermaneutically negative
and the hermaneutically positive.  Merci, Professor for the words to
classify the all too obvious differences.  Has this philosophical
plane been above the neads of any of those present?

  The chairman notes the time.  Lacking dramatic material to close
profoundly, he says "Goodbye and thank you all, I'm off to the Alps
to ski.  The dangers there are not hypothetical, the process is
better understood, and the benefits more certain. But, I have not
lacked here for introduction to high altitudes.

The dream had been too well remembered.


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  [Between the rDNA hearing and departure for Switzerland--and
then to Morocco for Sylvestre evening with the King--I went to Ann
Arbor with the right honorable Joseph A. Califano, Jr., Secretary of
Health, Education and Welfare.  We both received honorary doctorates
from the University of Michigan.]

  This excerpt was transcribed on July 26, 1985, from the Swiss
student notebook found in the green diary covering December, 1977.
In preparing a few remarks for my introduction to the Informational
Seminar on the Genome, July 23, 1986, held at NIH, in Conference
Room 10, I took snatches of the parts covering Watson, Tooze and
Sinsheimer .  The room and the assemblage reminded me of that
earlier, more historical hearing on the revision of the DNA
Guidelines.

  Had we not succeeded at that time in preserving a voluntary
continuation of the use of restriction enzymes, the 1986 conference
on the genome might have been far off in the future.

D.S.Fredrickson

July 26, 1986