KIE: The U.S. Court of Appeals is considering a motion by the National Institutes of Health and the University of California, Berkeley, to lift a lower court ban on field trials of recombinant DNA organisms. Last spring, a U.S. District Court judge granted activist Jeremy Rifkin's request for an injunction and blocked NIH from approving any field trials of recombinant organisms without first furnishing an environmental impact statement. If the court requires NIH's Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC) to furnish an individual impact statement before each trial, Rifkin will have established that RAC's review procedures are subject to the National Environmental Policy Act, and possibly will have opened the way for routine court challenges of every RAC-approved field test.