What is enlightening to me is that there is a gap in trying to increase awareness of what happens between the bill, which is all-encompassing, and regulations development. We need to do a better job of communicating that.
We're absolutely committed to consultation. On some of the current framework, we're thinking about a licence that will encompass the risk group as a whole. We're not asking for licences for individual pathogens. If you manipulate a pathogen, as long as you don't increase its impact on health or its pathogenicity, and it's within that scope, you're not required to have another licence just because you've manipulated an organism. If, however, the way you've manipulated the organism increases its pathogenicity and brings it to a level 3 or 4 risk, give us a call about any questions on that. We would like to discuss it, and this expert scientific committee can be brought to bear to discuss some of those situations.
In the licensing scheme itself we can certainly go a long way toward minimizing the actual burden on the research community.