One city’s concern

Press, 23 February 1977, Page 20

One city’s concern

From the "Economist,” London

Since last summer a committee of Cambridge citizens has imposed seven months of delays on genetic research at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But on February 7, at an ‘ angry debate on whether the universities themselves should be made to pay for monitoring research that many consider dangerous the Cambridge City Council finally voted to allow research to continue, provided it meets the safety regulations proposed by the citizens’ committee. The decision is all the more striking since Cambridge has a long-standing feud with its powerful universities; the city’s Mayor, Mr Alfred Vellucci, enjoys making Harvard flesh creep by threatening to turn Harvard Yard into a car park. Nonetheless, the new city ordinance will place strict controls' over a branch of academic research and sets a national precedent that will soon be followed elsewhere. At issue are the experiments to recombine D.N.A., the molecules which carry hereditary traits from one generation to the next. Scientists are optimistic that the

new organisms thev are creating will combat disease; but critics of their work fear new strains of disease might be accidentally created which could race unchecked through the community. D.N.A. molecules multiply with astonishing speed when combined, in the laboratory, with the bacterium Escherichia coli, which also exists in the human intestine. The fear is that E-coli bacteria containing recombined D.N.A. might be carried out of the laboratory in waste material or by workers, with fatal results. Until the effects of the D.N.A. experiments are better understood, genetic scientists themselves are anxious to take strict precautions. In 1975 they agreed to construct special laboratories for their research and to try to develop new strains of bacteria which would be unable to live outside them But when, last summer. Harvard disclosed its plans to build such a laboratory, its scientists disagreed violently about the potential hazards of their research. In response to this confusion. Cambridge City Council set up its citizens’ com-

mittee — including a former Mayor, an engineer, a professor of urban planning, a doctor, a secretary, and several community activists — to make recommendations on behalf of the people of the city.

the committee concluded that neither the risks nor the advantages of the D.N.A. experiments were properly known. But it recommended that research should be allowed to go forward, on condition that it met the guidelines established last summer by the National Institute of Health and new regulations to be drafted by the City of Cambridge. Concern is not limited to Massachusetts. In California a law. stricter than any proposed so far. to limit research on D.N.A. is being drafted with the support of the Governor, Mr Jerry Brown. Il follows the guidelines of the National Institute of Health (which applv currently only to N.I.H. and university scientists getting support from the Federal Government, and not to industry). hut is much tougher Supporters of the California bill hope that it will bn tlwfirst statutory restriction on all recombinant D.N.A. research.