It is one of the lowliest of nature's creatures, a rod-shaped beastie less than a ten-thousandth of an inch long. Its normal habitat is the intestine. Its functions there are still basically unknown. Yet this tiny parcel of protoplasm has now become the center of a stormy controversy that has divided the scientific community, stirred fears—often farfetched—about tampering with nature, and raised the prospect of unprecedented federal and local controls on basic scientific research. Last week the bacterium known to scientists as Escherichia coli* (E. coli, for short) even became a preoccupation at the highest levels of government.
Appearing before a Senate subcommittee on behalf of the Carter Administration, HEW Secretary Joseph Califano asked Congress to impose federal restrictions on recombinant DNA research, a new form of genetic inquiry involving E. coli. The urgency of Califano's request underlined the remarkable fact that a longtime dream of science, genetic engineering, is at hand —and, some fear, already out of hand. In laboratories across the nation, scientists are combining segments of E. coli's DNA with the DNA of plants, animals and other bacteria. By this process, they may well be creating forms of life different from any that exist on earth.
That this exciting new research holds great promise but could also pose some peril was stressed in the day-long testimony before Senator Edward Kennedy's health subcommittee. Califano called recombinant DNA "a scientific tool of enormous potential." He also warned about possible—though unknown—hazards and concluded: "There is no reasonable alternative to regulation under law." Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, involved in the controversy over genetic-engineering projects at Harvard and M.I.T., argued for the public right to regulate the research. Said he: "Genetic manipulation to create new forms of life places biologists at a threshold similar to that which physicists reached when they first split the atom. I think it is fair to say that the genie is out of the bottle."
The issue, stated simply, is whether that genie is good or evil. Proponents of this research in DNA—the master molecule of life—are convinced that it can help point the way toward a new promised land—of understanding and perhaps curing cancer and such inherited diseases as diabetes and hemophilia; of inexpensive new vaccines; of plants that draw their nitrogen directly from the air rather than from costly fertilizers; of a vastly improved knowledge of the genetics of all plants and animals, including eventually even humans (TIME special section, April 19, 1971).