No questions asked. Full speed ahead. A partial answer to that question has appeared in the July issue of GeneWatch, the bulletin of the Council for Responsible Genetics. Susan Wright, a science historian at the University of Michigan, writes about an MIT archive in which she found the transcript of a fateful meeting that took place in 1976 at the National Institutes of Health. Then, as now, the greatest area of concern was microbes.
Higher organisms carry their DNA around in discrete packages inside cell nuclei.
They release genes into the world only under relatively controlled acts of reproduction. Bacteria and viruses, on the other hand, slosh genes around in a shockingly messy way. They pick them up and drop them off, shuffle them, trade them, insert them into the supposedly organized genomes of higher forms of life. That's how viruses infect us. It's also one of the ways geneticists paste genes from one kind of critter into another.