December 1, 1976

Dr. Philip Handler
President —
National Academy of Sciences
2101 Constitution Avenue
Washington, D.C. 20418

Dear Phil,

This may or may not overlap a phone call that I am trying to get to you,
but I just wanted very quickly to be sure that the Academy was tooling up for
what promises to be a very complex and pervasive issue: namely the foxic
Substances Gontrol Act. I have not followed the legislative history of this
but I am sure that you must have played some part in it during the last
several years.

Now it comes time for implementation and my reading of the act tells me
that it is one of the most complex and ramifying pieces of legislation that
the Congress has passed in many years. The administrator of EPA is under the
gun to produce some regulations very quickly - for example in the rostor of
"old chemical substances",and I doubt that anybody has really given very much
thought to how complex the entire enterprise is going to be. Besides its
impact on the chemicalsindustry per se, I am sure you are way ahead of me
in foreseeing the ways in which its administrative implementation are going
to impact the further conduct of chemical and indeed all scientific research.
I had not heard (nor by the way had Dave Goslin whom I saw yesterday) of any
specific Academy response to this, and I am afraid that there is going to be
a very short deadline between the time that a requirement is recognized and
some regulations begin to be cast in concrete. There are, of course, many
industry groups who are taking an active role in this, but I think that
research science - as well as the national interest - require the particular
perspectives of the Academy. »

I am still in the middle of reading and trying to understand the details
of the act, but if you have any doubt at all what I am driving at, I would
be glad to discuss it further with you over the telephone. This is not to say
that I expect to play a very active role in the further development of the
S&cademy's position for which I am sure you could find many vert effective
nominees.

Sincerely yours,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics

JL/rr