Roy Curtiss was an attendee at the Asilomar Conference and member of the Recombinant DNA Molecule Program Advisory Committee, which evaluated the safety risks and containment requirements of recombinant DNA experiments. After first agreeing to the voluntary moratorium on such experiments, Curtiss came to regard genetic engineering experiments involving the much-studied K-12 strain of the bacterium Escherichia coli as harmless, and called for revising the NIH guidelines to ease E. coli K-12 containment requirements. In this letter he addressed problems of definition of what constituted recombinant DNA molecules in Congressional bills that sought to achieve the opposite: to impose stricter regulation of recombinant DNA research.
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