Part 2 of 2 (Page 1)
by Jeremy Rifkin, Mother Jones
Research by Larry Gordon and Dan Smith
This article was originally published back in 1977 in Mother Jones magazine.
This industry-weighted committee on recombinant DNA was scheduled to present its recommendations on the "creation of new life forms" to the President in mid-January, although it may be weeks or months before the report's contents are made public. The report is expected to cover several major items:
How Will Dangers Be Contained?
When the federal government started doing research some years ago on infectious diseases afflicting cattle and other animals, it set up an Animal Disease Center on an uninhabited island off the easternmost tip of Long Island.
The lab is windowless. A barbed-wire fence surrounds the entire island. Under the fence, three feet of buried concrete prevent rodents and insects from burrowing through to the facility.
Every one of the Center's workers gets an elaborate security check by the FBI before being allowed access to the Center. Employees wear sterilized garments and work under air pressure lower than outside, and all are required to shower between each experiment. Security guards protect the premises from unauthorized trespassers.
Researchers and government officials are taking every precaution possible to make sure no germs that could infect American farm animals escape the island.
By contrast, NIH's own maximum-security DNA-research facility is a mobile trailer parked off a side street outside the agency's office in Bethesda, Maryland, a residential suburb of Washington. It is protected only by a simple seven-foot cyclone fence. According to NIH officials, the mobile trailer is not yet operational because they are still fixing its leaky roof.
Some secretaries and other office workers at NIH are quite frightened about the trailer parked outside their offices. One of them called the environmental organization Friends of the Earth a few weeks ago, pleading for help. "The employees are all talking about this P-4 trailer and we're scared to death," she said. "Can you do something? Anything."
The set of guidelines the government has drawn up for recombinant-DNA research, although elaborate, are nowhere near so tight as the security precautions at the Animal Disease Center. True, there are the so-called physical-containment provisions, requiring laboratory air to be kept under low pressure, researchers to take showers, and so forth. There are also a series of biological-containment requirements, which mandate that certain experiments be done with weakened strains of bacteria that theoretically could not survive outside the laboratory.
Nonetheless, these labs are usually located in populated areas, and the government does not have the staff to police them and make sure the physical- and biological-containment requirements are met.
Most recombinant-DNA experiments are done with E. coli bacteria, which exists in the intestinal tracts of all human beings. The chief danger involved here is that a research accident could produce a particularly virulent virus that causes a disease for which there is no immunization.
A lab technician who accidentally breathed or swallowed a few of its particles could then begin rapidly spreading the virus to others-perhaps eventually to a whole population.
"Only one accident is needed," biologist Cavalieri says, "to endanger the future of mankind."
Sinsheimer of Cal Tech believes that the government guidelines are insufficient. In a letter to NIH this year he says, "I cannot believe that under these proposed guidelines the organisms can be contained... The organisms will inevitably escape and they will enter into the various ecological niches known to be inhabited by E. coli." The consequences, Sinsheimer says, "are highly predictable and likely highly dangerous."
Who Will Regulate the New Life Forms?
The most astonishing thing about commercial recombinant-DNA research today is that nobody knows which government agencies have the authority to regulate it.
Perhaps the Center for Disease Control, which oversees the interstate shipments of hazardous biological agents; perhaps the Food and Drug Administration, when companies begin using recombinant-DNA techniques to create drugs or hormones for human use; perhaps the Patent Office, when companies apply for patents on these products; perhaps the Environmental Protection Agency, under the new Toxic Substances Control Act.
Then of course there's the National Institutes of Health, which has drawn up the research guidelines on the subject but which has no power to enforce them.
Industry loves this situation, of course. The confusing welter of bureaucracies makes it much easier for the corporations to go ahead and do what they want.
The gaps are huge.
When Dr. Robert Elder of the FDA was asked if his agency would be informed if, for example, test animals in a commercial lab began mysteriously dying from unknown diseases after being injected with a new recombinant-DNA-type drug, he said that there would be "no requirement that [the company] inform us," and that he knew of no other agencies that would be privy to such information.
Given vast loopholes like this, it is still more remarkable to learn, as we go to press, that a significant faction of the Interagency Committee is urging that federal guidelines on recombinant-DNA research be made voluntary and that the industry be left to police itself. In the unlikely event that the committee takes a tougher stance and recommends, for instance, the creation of a new super-agency with enough money and muscle to closely police all DNA research, look for the industry to resist.
There will be cries that the government is interfering with free scientific inquiry; the drug companies will fight back with all the lobbying power at their command. If the committee compromises and urges a distribution of regulatory authority among various agencies, government regulation may remain almost as diffuse and ineffective as it is now.
Who Will Own and Profit from New Life Forms?
Not a single person on the government's Interagency Committee we interviewed even questioned the right of commercial firms to patent processes for creating new forms of life. Dr. Delbert S. Barth, the Environmental Protection Agency representative to the Interagency Committee, summed up the prevailing sentiment of his fellow committee members on the question: "This is a moral and ethical question-and I don't have a strong opinion."
And because the members of this group either are pro-business or do not have a strong opinion on the moral or ethical questions involved, they will in all likelihood recommend that private corporations like Miles, Upjohn and Abbott be entrusted with the authority to create and market new forms of life, for profit.
The only question regarding commercial patents being addressed by the committee is a technical one: how to protect the secrecy of research going on in commercial labs so that competitors will not steal trade secrets before the firm can patent a new life-form process.
Under the existing NIH guidelines covering university DNA research, scientists must disclose all their plans in advance. (Two universities-Stanford and the University of California-have applied for patents on their DNA-recombination processes.) Industry leaders say that these provisions of the guidelines would be unacceptable because, in the words of Dr. Jerome Birnbaum, director of Merck, Sharpe and Dohme Laboratories, "if you disclose your research plans, you lose the right to a patent."
The Interagency Committee is expected to go along with the industry's demands to keep its research secret by establishing some kind of provision whereby only a select few government officials will be privy to the specific nature of the research going on in the corporate laboratories. An awesome thought, since it's only a matter of time before molecular biologists are able to create new plant and animal forms or alter the genetic characteristics of the human species.
A few researchers-despite the opposition of most scientists-are already talking about just that. One of them is Dr. James Bonner, Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology, who has written: "We can control the [genetic] changes to produce better individuals.
"This is even more important now that we see limitations being placed on the number of children that may be born into the world. There is a moral obligation to see that these children are free of genetic defects, and we may even have to proceed to the logical conclusion that these children should be provided with the best genetic material we can obtain. Man has done this with all of his domestic animals and plants. It seems likely that he will do it also with himself."
Dr. Bonner, whose words on the subject appear in a book published by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, goes on to say: "The logical outcome of activities in modifying the genetic make-up of man is to reach the stage where couples will want their children to have the best possible genes.
Sexual procreation will be virtually ended.
One suggestion has been to remove genetic material from each individual immediately after birth and then promptly sterilize that individual. During the individual's lifetime, record would be kept of accomplishments and characteristics.
After the individual's death, a committee decides if the accomplishments are worthy of procreation into other individuals. If so, genetic material would be removed from the depository and stimulated to clone a new individual. If the committee decides the genetic material is unworthy of procreation it is destroyed... The question is indeed not a moral one but a temporal one-when do we start?"
Up to now, recombinant-DNA research has been seen as largely a health and safety question. With the possibility of hazardous viruses escaping from labs, it is indeed. But even this question is bound to seem secondary as the broader implications of recombinant DNA begin to be understood by the general public.
When America begins to ask itself whether individual scientists and a handful of government bureaucrats and private companies have the right to rearrange the evolutionary order and create new forms of life, the recombinant-DNA question will emerge as a focus of national attention.
Mayor Peter Memeth of South Bend, Indiana, one city in which recombinant-DNA research is going on, touches a central nerve when he says, "if they had all that trouble in Tennessee with the apes, then they haven't seen anything yet, I guess."
Considering the fury that engulfed the Scopes trial, the issue of artificially creating and controlling new life forms may well reach very deep. The controversy it raises will make the debate over abortion seem a mere brush fire by comparison.
Dr. Harry Hollis, Director of the Committee on Family and Special Moral Concerns of the Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and a spokesperson for President Carter's own denomination, says:
"I feel very strongly that Huxley's warnings have a bearing for us today. After Dachau and Watergate, we shouldn't take lightly what human beings are capable of inflicting on each other. This is not just science fiction. Genetic engineering for the worst of reasons is a possibility in this world in which we live."
The issue of who has the authority to develop and produce new forms of life is perhaps the single most important question any society has ever had to grapple with.
With the dawn of the Organic Age upon us, there is no longer any question of going back. The question now is how we proceed, and how we prevent ourselves from embarking on an inexorable corporate course toward Huxley's Brave New World.
Mother Jones
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