Biohazard / by Michael Rogers.

  • Rogers, Michael, 1950-
Date:
1977
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Biohazard / by Michael Rogers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    202 • BIOHAZAIID What Roy has done, said Stanley Falkow, is monu¬ mental, staggering. But it opens up the door to certain experi¬ ments. It's a serious thing. Some of those experiments are probably already being done with EKi, God knows ... so I'm torn. But I have reservations. The rest of the panel tried to coax him. You have reser¬ vations about the whole concept of biological containment! one NIH representative chided. But Falkow would not budge. When the vote to recommend certification came up, there were four ayes and one abstention. The NIH official promptly reworded the motion to meets the criteria of the discussion —and only then, with reluctance, did Falkow vote yes. Neither Falkow nor the Boston Area Group need have worried so much. ЕКг, as it developed, was not around the comer. Just down the hall, in another MIT classroom, the EK2 phage candidate was disapproved and sent back to the drawing board. And while Curtiss's E. coli was approved, no accompanying plasmids or phage existed—and so, in the absence of a fully tested host/vector combination, it would still be many months before EK2 work could even begin. A few hours after the meeting of the safe host and vector working group concluded, I saw Curtiss at a small party in a Cambridge apartment, and told him that his E. coli had passed muster. He shrugged. He was worried, he said, that some might think the panel had been a stacked deck. But he was even more concerned that this particular E. coli, the product of so many months' research, might someday be con¬ sidered for EK3 status. I hope not, he said. We can do much, much better now. One recurrent topic at the Miles Symposium was the in¬ ternational reaction to recombinant DNA research. Already there were stories of European researchers who had packed up their experiments and crossed borders in order to perform work that their own labs would not allow. The international picture was nothing if not diverse. Just