The Andromeda Fear

Soon after Britain's Dr. Douglas Bevis (see story above) abruptly quit his work on fertilization-implantation techniques, eleven eminent U.S. investigators, including one Nobel laureate, Dr. James D. Watson, declared that they are halting certain experiments in genetic manipulation of bacteria. Their reason: fear that if they do not stop, they may inadvertently loose upon the world new forms of life--semisynthetic organisms that could cause epidemics, or resist control by antibiotics, or increase the incidence of cancer.

The researchers tried to avoid the horrific words biological warfare, but the possibility that their work might be subverted to that inhuman end haunted them. The U.S. investigators, having taken a step with few or no precedents in the history of science, also urged their colleagues round the world to follow then-lead until potential hazards can be better evaluated and controlled.

The real origin of this concern was the discovery in 1953 at Cambridge University by Watson and Dr. Francis Crick that the pattern of all life forms is determined by a double-helical molecule of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. Since then other investigators have found ways of cutting a long nucleic-acid molecule, by chemical means, into shorter pieces that can then be recombined.

These snippets can now be incorporated into bacteria to create, in effect, new microorganisms whose potential for causing disease in plants, animals or man himself is as yet unknown and cannot be predicted. *

What makes the prospect especially hazardous is that one of the molecular biologists' favorite tools is the bacterium Escherichia coli, which inhabits every human bowel, is present in normal excrement and is highly amenable to laboratory manipulation. Its natural form is dangerous only when it runs rampant in an accidental or surgical wound or in organs other than the gastrointestinal tract. But a laboratory mutant might cause a plague of infectious disease resistant to available antibiotics. Altered DNA can be dynamite.

The scientists, whose views are being published in two leading journals, Science and Nature, conceded that some research may have to be abandoned, or at least deferred, under their plan.

"But," said Panel Chairman Dr. Paul Berg of Stanford, "discretion permits no other course."

* Such diseases would result from a reshuffling of genes and not from new genetic material like the virus from outer space in Michael Crichton's 1969 novel (later a movie), The Andromeda Strain.

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