An emotional debate, heretofore waged in scientific journals¹ and university communities, has now moved to congressional hearing rooms. The debate concerns the potentially beneficial but perhaps hazardous technique of recombinant deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) research, in which DNA molecules—the genetic material of every cell that transmits an organism's hereditary characteristics—are chemically cut and then recombined into new molecules. This technique has been both touted as man's most important scientific discovery and vilified as a hideous prologue to a Brave New World through "genetic engineering."