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Despite the sniping, the NIH group by last summer managed to turn Asilomar's directive into concrete rules. The guidelines continue the ban against the potentially most dangerous experiments. They also provide two principal lines of defense against lesser hypothetical risks. They establish four levels of physical containment; these range from standard laboratory precautions (dubbed "P-l") for experiments in the lowest-risk category—say, injecting harmless bacterial genes into E. coli—to ultrasecure laboratories ("P-4") for work with animal tumor viruses or primate cells. At present, two new P-4 facilities are almost ready. One is a gleaming white trailer parked behind a bar bed-wire fence on the grounds of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. It has a totally sealed environment, airlocks, decontamination systems, showers for workers after experiments, and sealed cabinets accessible only through attached gloves. Some "worst case" experiments, involving animal tumor viruses, will begin in the trailer this summer. NIH is also converting some of the abandoned germ-warfare labs at Maryland's Fort Detrick into similar super-containment facilities. In addition to the labs, the guidelines require the use of the self-destructing, escape-proof microbes for certain higher-risk experiments.
Most researchers, eager to continue their work in cracking various genetic riddles, welcomed the guidelines. Numerous universities across the country had already begun work on new P-3 labs, which have a lower and less costly level of containment (air locks, limited access, safety cabinets with curtains of flowing air) than P-4 facilities. Not everyone, though, was pleased.
Egged on by Wald and his biologist wife, Ruth Hubbard, Cambridge's Mayor Alfred Velluci used the escalating DNA furor to badger his old foe, Harvard. He convened the city council in an effort to halt DNA research at the school. Said Velluci: "Something could crawl out of the laboratory, such as a Frankenstein." At the council's request, Harvard and M.I.T. agreed to a moratorium on P-3 research while an eight-member citizens' review board studied the issue. In February, the council overrode Velluci and passed an ordinance permitting recombinant DNA work to be resumed in Cambridge—under standards only slightly more strict than the NIH guidelines.
Most scientists breathed a sigh of relief; the specter of local governments proclaiming a hodgepodge of crippling restrictions on the freedom of inquiry had faded—at least temporarily. Local politicians now may go along with the impending federal legislation, which is expected to impose restraints on all researchers—including those at previously unregulated industry labs. Still, scientists remain concerned over any political controls on their work. At last week's Senate hearing, these fears were voiced by Norton Zinder, a molecular geneticist at Rockefeller University. Said he: "We are moving into a precedent-making area —the regulation of an area of scientific research—and I must plead that this be done with extreme care and without haste. The record of past attempts of authoritative bodies, either church or state, to control intellectual thought and work have led to some of the sorriest chapters in human history."