Excerpt from Donald S. Fredrickson's diary on the exemption of E. coli experiments from the NIH Guidelines for Research Involving Recombinant DNA Molecules

Digital Record

Identifier: 101584939X136

Staff Only

Digital Object (text)

Dates

29 October 1979

Extent

3 Pages

Description

In the revised NIH guidelines for recombinant DNA research released in January 1979, containment requirements for experiments with Escherichia coli (E. coli) strain K-12, the most commonly-used host-vector system in recombinant DNA research, were greatly eased. This reflected a growing realization that experiments during which foreign DNA fragments were inserted into this strain of E. coli did not present the environmental hazards earlier feared by scientists.