• Britain's Genetic Manipulation Advisory Group (GMAG) is preparing to adopt a new approach to assessing the risks of ‘genetic engineering’ experiments. GMAG's statement—approved in principle at a meeting on 2 November—appears below. The scheme is based on an attempt to assign numerical risks to individual experiments as a product of three factors: the ‘access factor’, the ‘expression factor’, and the ‘damage factor’. But the numbers are used only to rank the risks so that the experiments can be assigned consistently to the containment categories I to IV. Qualitative matters are also taken into account, for biology has not yet been reduced entirely to numbers. The scheme will be used when there are enough data to employ it; otherwise assessment will revert to the old Williams ‘phylogenetic’ guidelines. Its great virtue appears to lie in its objective scientific basis and its consequent encouragement to research on risks.
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References
Report of the Working Party on the Practice of Genetics Manipulation. HMSO, Cmnd 6600, 1976.
Health and Safety (Genetic Manipulation) Regulations 1978. SI 1978, No. 752.
First Report of the Genetic Manipulation Advisory Group. HMSO, Cmnd 7215, 1978.
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Genetic manipulation: new guidelines for UK. Nature 276, 104–108 (1978). https://doi.org/10.1038/276104a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/276104a0