Hospitality, Cambridge Style

Biogen Corp. thought there couldn't be a nicer place to settle.

Unlike every other city in the country, company officials reasoned, Cambridge was full of people who would understand that their recombinant DNA development facility was not a monster plant.

And, they figured, the city had already gone through a two-year struggle over DNA research in the city and decided, in the words of Biogen lawyer Kenneth Novack, "not to ban it and not to let it be done totally laissezfaire, but to allow the research if strict guidelines were followed."

But two weeks after the Swiss-based firm announced its plans for the facility--the first manufacturing plant using DNA technology on the East Coast--Biogen executives are not quite so confident.

The Cambridge city council last Monday decided that manufacturing DNA was a whole different ballgame from DNA research and reactivated the Cambridge Experimentation Review Board (CERB) to draw up manufacturing guidelines.

The CERB hearings will take time, and they could result in regulations so strict they could force Biogen and other firms out of the city.

But, says city councilor Alfred E. Vellucci, the longtime protagonist of the DNA fight, the new rules are necessary both because manufacturing involves different processes than research and because the work will be performed by private corporations, not universities dependent on federal funding.

The Biogen facility's limited manufacturing will probably require larger amounts of fermenting bacteria than university research, a fact that makes Vellucci and others in the East Cambridge neighborhood where the plant is slated for construction fearful of pollution or accidental release.

And, because the firm will not use federal funds, Vellucci says, it does not need to follow the National Institute of Health guidelines that universities in the city adhere to. "As it stands now," he added, "they can just tell us to go to hell."