The Nation - News from May 17, 1989

U.S. District Judge John G. Penn in Washington signed an agreement that clears the way for the first authorized human gene transfer and requires the National Institutes of Health to open future decision-making on such experiments to the public. The settlement came in a lawsuit filed Jan. 30 by the Foundation on Economic Trends and its president, Jeremy Rifkin, that had challenged the first planned introduction of a foreign gene into human beings, an experiment to be conducted on 10 patients terminally ill with melanoma, a skin cancer. The suit had said the NIH Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee approved the experiment without conducting proper public hearings.