City Committee Will Study Manufacture Using DNA

The Cambridge city council voted last night to reactivate the committee that drew up its first-in-the-nation ordinance governing recombinant DNA research, and asked the panel to examine the question of manufacturing involving DNA.

Dormant since 1977, when it recommended the regulations currently governing DNA research in the city, the Cambridge Experimentation Review Board (CERB) will study recent calls for stiff guidelines to govern commercial manufacture using recombinant DNA techniques within the city.

The decision came two weeks after Biogen, Inc., a Swiss-based firm, announced plans for an East Cambridge facility for research and manufacture of recombinant DNA products, at least in limited quantities.

Giant

"This manufacturing talk is a first for Cambridge, and it's going to get bigger; it could become a giant industry," councillor Alfred E. Vellucci, who introduced the proposal, said yesterday, adding that the city should consider manufacturing in a different light than research.

Biogen officials were unavailable for comment last night. A company executive charged with setting up United States operations, Andre Muller, said last week the firm had other options for a location and that if Cambridge changed the regulations governing DNA work in the city, Biogen would have to reconsider its plans.

"If the city does not want us, we will go elsewhere," Muller said.

Cambridge city manager James L. Sullivan, who praised the decision to reactivate the CERB, said last night the "purpose of the CERB will not be to obstruct companies, or to have them not consider Cambridge."

"We don't want to say we don't want you. We do want to say here are the guidelines," Sullivan said, adding "manufacturing ought to be looked at separately, since it is a different thing from the research that we now control."

The CERB took testimony from experts and studied proposals from around the country in 1976 and 1977, and then recommended that researchers be required to follow the voluntary National Institute of Health (NIH) guidelines if they wished to remain in Cambridge.

The CERB also suggested the formation of the Cambridge Biohazards Committee, which has been handling the Biogen case.

First on the CERB agenda will be a Vellucci proposal to prohibit P-3 level research by private firms in the city.

Currently, P-3 work is permitted under the NIH guidelines, and universities would continue to be allowed to perform the work even if Vellucci's ordinance is adopted. But private firms, including Biogen, which Muller said will reserve one room of its facility for P-3 work, would be limited to the less restrictive P-1 and P-2 work under the ordinance.

"All this DNA work is for the money now," Vellucci said, adding "now, do we know that they'll really refrain from P-3 or P-4?"

The council also re-enacted its original ordinance controlling DNA research in the city, an ordinance that had been allowed to lapse "leaving the city in a vulnerable position" according to city councilor David Sullivan.

Vellucci told the council he thought the legislation had not lapsed accidentally; Instead, he said, "I believe someone tampered with the ordinance, someone connected with the universities, who wanted to end the regulations."

The research guidelines technically lapsed two years ago when the city adopted an ordinace creating the position of health commissioner. Provisions of that ordinance negated the DNA-ordinance although city officials did not notice it at the time