Genetic engineering

It has always been a major plank of those who support genetic engineering that today's laboratory techniques are so sophisticated that the risks of an accident involving recombinant DNA are now almost infinitesimal. That claim has shaped the guidelines regulating research in genetic manipulations throughout the world. In Britain, for instance, new laws passed last year under the Health and Safety at Work Act now make it obligatory for scientists wishing to carry out genetic manipulations to notify both the Genetic Manipulation Advisory Group (GMAG) and the Health and Safety Executive. How reassuring!

So long as dear Dr. Frankenstein has a laboratory specially fitted with airlocks and filters, biological safety cabinets, facilities for changing clothes, and autoclaves within the building, he can continue his work in the knowledge that his experiments are quite safe.

But can we be so confident that any laboratory practices will ever be of a sufficiently high standard to safeguard the public? And should we trust scientists to police themselves? Events at Birmingham University's Smallpox Laboratory - where Janet Parker, a medical photographer, died after being infected by a virus which escaped from the laboratory - shows that it is dangerous to rely on any safety measure.

Professor Reginald Shooter's confidential report on the incident relates an appalling history of bureaucratic incompetence, professional ineptitude and downright dishonesty. It emerges:

• that the head of the laboratory, Professor Henry Bedson (who committed suicide shortly after Janet Parker was found to have smallpox) failed to inform the authorities of changes in his research that could have affected safety. He was in fact working with recombinant techniques.
• that the Dangerous Pathogens Advisory Group inspected the laboratory on two occasions and each time recommended the smallpox research be continued there, despite the fact that the facilities at the laboratory fell far short of those required by law.
• that several of the staff at the laboratory had received no special training. Bedson even allowed a schoolleaver to work with smallpox after only 9 months as a trainee technician.
• that inspectors from the World Health Organisation had told Bedson that the physical facilities at the laboratory did not meet WHO standards, but had nonetheless only recommended a few changes in laboratory procedure, such as banning mouth-pipetting.
• that Bedson lied to the WHO about the volume of work handled by the laboratory, telling them that it had progressively declined since 1973, when in fact it had risen dramatically as Bedson desperately tried to finish his work before the laboratory closed.
• and finally; Janet Parker had not been vaccinated recently enough to protect her against smallpox. Such a woeful litany of incompetence hardly inspires confidence in the claim that the public will be protected from the hazards of recombinant-DNA by the professionalism of scientists.

But is it not inevitable that such accidents will occur? As Dr. Tom Pollock, director of the epidemiology department of the Central Health Laboratory, put it to the Daily Telegraph,

"You get awfully used to the same techniques day after day and so it is easy to take a few shortcuts with them. But, although it is understandable, it is of course totally wrong."

Wrong it may be, but it is precisely this human factor that makes calculations of risk in genetic engineering almost totally meaningless. Paul Berg, father of recombinant- DNA research and author of the 1974 call for a moratorium on genetic engineering, found that nearly all the researchers in his laboratory had built up immunity to the SV40 virus they were working on. Proof that they had been infected.

The pro-engineering lobby like to repeat risk estimates that calculate the probability of a contagious form of cancer being created in a laboratory and subsequently escaping as 1 in 10,000 million trillion. Were an accident to occur with a new bacterial strain, the results could be catastrophic, particularly since it is unlikely that either humans or the rest of the living world will have had any evolutionary experience of it, and will thus totally lack resistance.

And what right do a handful of scientists have to take it upon themselves to impose on the rest of humanity, risks that could, in the worst instances, threaten every living thing? There is only one way to eliminate the possibility of disaster, and that is to outlaw further experiments.