Plasmid Reference Center
Funding Concerns of the World Health Organization

The correspondence shown in this section illustrates the World Health Organization (WHO)'s fears regarding potential risks of Recombinant DNA.

In 1976 and 1977 the WHO, while acknowledging that plasmids were useful in research related to infectious diseases (for example in the study of R-Factors, the transfer of resistance to antibiotic drugs), stopped funding plasmid stock centers throughout the world.^{1, 2}

The WHO did not seem to realize that a loss of antibiotic effectiveness due to increasing resistance, could cause infectious diseases to spread throughout the world; further, that the extension of antibiotic resistance might also allow infectious diseases to spread from plants and animals to humans.

Stock centers affected included:

• Dr. F. E. Young, Department of Microbiology, University of Rochester School of Medicine
• American Type Culture Collection, Rockville, Maryland
• Dr. William B. Wood, Division of Biology, California Institute of Technology
• Dr. W. L. Barksdale, Department of Microbiology, New York University School of Medicine
• Dr. P. G. de Haan (Phabagen Collection), Department of Microbiology, State University of Utrecht, Transitorium iii, The Netherlands
• Dr. B. J. Bachmann, Department of Human Genetics, Yale University School of Medicine
• Dr. K. E. Sanderson, Department of Biology, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada
• Dr. George B. Saul II, Department of Biology, Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont
• Dr. W. L. French, Department of Zoology, Louisiana State University
• Dr. Helen V. Crouse, Institute of Molecular Physics, Florida State University
• Dr. Alexander Sokoloff, Biology Department, California State College, San Bernadino, California
• Dr. R. Briggs, Department of Zoology, Indiana University
• Dr. George Nace, Department of Zoology, University of Michigan
• Dr. M. Green, Jackson Laboratories, Bar Harbour, Maine
• Dr. Carl Hansen, Veterinary Research Branch, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland

¹  "The program on mechanisms of resistance to Antimicrobial Agents in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases had its inception in 1965 as a consequence for a report prepared for the Institute on drug resistance. ... Substantial clinical and epidemiological evidence indicates that resistance to antimicrobial agents is to a great extent plasmid mediated." For further information, see the excerpt from "Evolution of Support for Plasmid Research by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases" by Irving DeLappe , elsewhere in this section.

²   "Proceedings of the 46th Annual Business Meeting", Genetics, 88, 1978 Supplement, #4, Part 2: s125-s127. Especially page s125:

The Committee on Maintenance of Genetic Stocks has for the past two years been educating itself to assume more responsibility in planning for the preservation of our national resources of genetically defined germplasm. The Committee was established by the Society because of concern that valuable and sometimes irreplaceable genetic stocks were being lost because the responsibility for assuring their maintenance had not been assumed by any persons or institutions.
       Until recently the committee has been able to serve only in a watch-dog capacity, alerting geneticists of situations in which valuable collections of stocks were endangered by lack of adequate supervision or support, as upon the retirement or death of a curator or the reduction of research grant support.

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