Genetic engineering breakthroughs in the late 1960s and early 1970s came with a lot of promise—and peril too. Fears about what could happen with recombinant DNA experiments put scientists in the middle of a moral dilemma. Did they have a responsibility to consider how others might use their work? Or was their place simply to be on the lab bench?
In this two-part episode, we’ll cover the story of the first time scientists stopped and considered the ramifications of their work, with a self-imposed moratorium. And we’ll explore all the controversy that led to the historic pivotal meeting at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in 1975 to determine the future of genetic engineering.
Credits
Host: Alexis Pedrick
Senior Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Associate Producer: Sarah Kaplan
Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer
Theme composed by Jonathan Pfeffer. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions
Resource List
A Deep Conversation with Jon Beckwith: A History of Scientific and Social Activism. University of California Television. YouTube.
Berg, Paul. “Paul Berg Letter.” Wellcome Collection.
Chemical Heritage Foundation: The Emergence of Biotechnology. Science History Institute.
Cobb, Matthew. As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age. New York: Basic Books, 2021.
Cohen, Stanley N. Science, Biotechnology, and Recombinant DNA: A Personal History. UC Berkeley.
DNA Learning Center. “Asilomar Meeting.”
Genetic Dreams, Genetic Nightmares. BBC.
Fredrickson, Donald S. Asilomar and Recombinant DNA: The End of the Beginning.
DNA: The Secret of Life. IMDb.
Jurassic Park. IMDb.
Late 1960s-Early 1970s Anti-War Marches. YouTube.
“Letter from Maxine Singer and Dieter Söll to Philip Handler.”
Lear, John. Recombinant DNA: The Untold Story. Goodreads.
Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Gene: An Intimate History. Simon & Schuster.
McElheny, Victor. Attempting the Impossible at Asilomar.
McElheny, Victor. Gene Transplants Seen Helping Farmers and Doctors. The New York Times, May 20, 1974.
Nova: The Gene Engineers. Dailymotion.
Protein Synthesis: An Epic on the Cellular Level. YouTube.
Rejection of Science Worries American Scientists. The New York Times, April 5, 1970.
Rogers, Michael. The Pandora’s Box Congress. Rolling Stone.
The Gene: PBS. PBS Learning Media.
“The MacNeil/Lehrer Report: Genetic Engineering.” American Archive of Public Broadcasting.
Transcript
Part One:
Alexis Pedrick: From the Science History Institute, I’m Alexis Pedrick, and this is Distillations. Today I wanna talk about one of my favorite childhood movies: Jurassic Park.
Jurassic Park: It’s, it’s a dinosaur. Welcome to Jurassic Park.
Alexis Pedrick: Jurassic Park was a huge hit, mostly because everyone loves giant prehistoric beasts. But the movie has a deeper meaning, which is why we’re talking about it on this show. This is Matthew Cobb, a zoologist and author of As Gods: A Moral History of The Genetic Age.
Matthew Cobb: Jurassic Park, which of course is not about rampaging dinosaurs, it’s about the dangers of genetic engineering. Potential dangers.
Alexis Pedrick: Potential dangers, indeed. In the movie, scientists have figured out how to create actual living dinosaurs by cloning their ancient DNA, and they’re ecstatic.
Jurassic Park: How’d you do this?….
Alexis Pedrick: It’s a huge scientific breakthrough, but not everyone is excited. Enter the sassy, saucy, chaos theorist, wearing a black shirt, half unbuttoned, and a gold chain, and played, expertly, in my opinion, by Jeff Goldblum. And he has a whole different take.
Jurassic Park: Yeah. Don’t you see the. Danger, uh, John, inherent in what you’re doing here? Genetic power is the most awesome force the planet’s ever seen, but you wield it like a kid that’s found his dad’s gun…. I, I don’t think you’re giving us our due credit. Our scientists have done things which nobody’s ever done before…. Yeah, yeah. But your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
Matthew Cobb: And that dilemma, right, ought to be at the heart of every new step in science and technology. Before you let it out, you think, is this the right thing to be doing? What are the problems associated with this?
Alexis Pedrick: In the movie, the answer to that, “should we” question becomes pretty obvious once the T-Rex escapes its paddock and proves Jeff Goldblum right.
Jurassic Park: Boy, do I hate being right all the time.
Alexis Pedrick: You know what happens next.
Jurassic Park: [T-Rex roar]
Alexis Pedrick: A couple of people are killed by dinosaurs, and the rest flee the island, lucky to get out alive. Now Jurassic Park was fiction. We still can’t actually clone dinosaurs, but the science it depicted was based on real developments in genetic engineering developments that happened 20 years before the movie came out.
NOVA Documentary: The Gene Engineers – Narrator: Scientists and the public are trying to come to terms with a dramatic new technique. A technique that gives scientists unprecedented power to manipulate nature.
Alexis Pedrick: Breakthroughs in the late 1960s and early 1970s promised to revolutionize genetic engineering. They brought hope of medical advances and agricultural advances, a huge boon to humankind. But they also brought fears of the unknown, the possibility of chaos and destruction, just like the T-Rex. And all of this uncertainty caused people to argue about whether the new science was good or bad and who exactly had the responsibility to decide if the benefits outweighed the risks. As much as I love Jurassic Park, this episode isn’t gonna be my scene by scene review of the best movie of the 1990s. It’s gonna be about the first time scientists actually did stop and consider the ramifications of their work. And just to be clear, it didn’t happen all at once. A lot of Jeff Goldblums had to ring a lot of alarm bells before the message sank in. The process was messy and complicated, and in some ways we’re still grappling with these issues today. It’s a story so big we couldn’t fit it all in one episode.
Chapter One. The First Alarm.
Alexis Pedrick: Jurassic Park did not disappoint the young science nerds in the audience.
Jurassic Park: Where do you get a hundred million year old dinosaur blood?… A hundred million years ago, there were mosquitoes just like today and just like today, they fed on the blood of animals, even dinosaurs…
Alexis Pedrick: It covered all the details of how exactly the park creator managed to find and clone ancient dinosaur DNA.
Jurassic Park: Until Jurassic Park scientists came along using sophisticated techniques, they extract the preserved blood from the mosquito and bingo dino-DNA.
Alexis Pedrick: What the movie doesn’t explain though, is that in the actual history of genetic engineering, it took many, many incremental steps before we got anywhere close to cloning animals.
Matthew Cobb: Ah, now we can, we can cut DNA at a precise place. We can separate it into tiny little bits. Now we can actually introduce it into a different kind of organism.
Alexis Pedrick: In 1967, a biochemist and Nobel laureate named Arthur Kornberg made synthetic viral DNA in a test tube, and it functioned just like real DNA. Here’s Kornberg himself, giving a lecture in 1997.
Arthur Kornberg: And when that result was announced, it was widely interpreted by the media as the “creation of life in the test tube.”
Alexis Pedrick: President Lyndon B. Johnson called it an awesome accomplishment and “one of the most important stories you ever read, or your daddy ever read, or your granddaddy ever read.” But just two years later, another team’s breakthrough got a very different reaction. In the fall of 1969, a 33-year-old Harvard researcher named Jonathan Beckwith isolated a single gene from a living organism, the bacterium E. coli. The ability to manipulate genes at will was unprecedented. It was a huge milestone. But Beckwith and his postdoctoral researcher, James Shapiro, had a less than celebratory reaction. Actually, they came in with some big Jeff Goldblum energy. They called a press conference and denounced themselves, saying, “the bad far outweighs the good In this particular work. It is far more frightening than hopeful.”
Matthew Cobb: They were leaping ahead. Their particular experiment wasn’t gonna do any harm, but they leapt ahead and foresaw, uh, the misuse of this technology perhaps for the creation of bio weapons, but also for malicious reasons–
Alexis Pedrick: They mentioned things like eugenics for sterilization, and designer babies. In other words, some valid ethical dilemmas worth considering.
Matthew Cobb: I mean, you’ve gotta remember there’d been, huge demonstrations, in particular over the Vietnam War. This was a very radical period.
1960s Protest Archive: Out, no, out, no. Out, no, out, no, out, no…There’s a thousand marching today… Shut it down! On strike, shut it down!
Matthew Cobb:There was an organization called Science for the People, uh, and, Beckwith was a leading member.
Alexis Pedrick: Here’s Beckwith in an interview from decades later.
Jonathan Beckwith: While I was working, uh, in my lab at Harvard Medical School, I discovered after a while that two of my students were in the organization. I hadn’t even known it, um, then after that, um, I got very involved myself.
Alexis Pedrick: Beckwith had learned about the eugenics movement and the role of geneticists in it from other members of Science for the People. And he felt a responsibility as a geneticist to not repeat that terrible history.
Jonathan Beckwith: So, I began to have issues about instances when social harm can persist and can hurt people.
Matthew Cobb: And they were questioning the meaning of science. Science is not simply a form of knowledge, but it is part of culture, and therefore it can also end up–despite perhaps the desires of the people who made a discovery–can end up being applied into all sorts of ways.
Alexis Pedrick: Beckwith’s postdoc, James Shapiro, announced he was quitting science altogether.
Matthew Cobb: There was a big article in Science magazine about this. When he was asked how he was gonna survive, he said, well, I’ll get by on my inheritance. Because he came from quite a wealthy family, I think there was a bit of posturing here. You know, left wing radical chic posturing, about this.
Alexis Pedrick: An article from the New York Times, just a couple of weeks after the press conference said, yes, sure bad things could come from this, but it also said this dilemma is not new. And it went on to belittle Shapiro and Beckwith’s arguments writing, “the first men to discover how to make fire must have realized soon afterwards what a dangerous weapon they had forged.” In short, it painted their stance as overblown, even immature. And other scientists were no kinder.
Matthew Cobb: Scientists greeted this with–you know, some people were extremely hostile. There were really angry letters in Science about this. Um, other people were rather amused by these younger, uh, people from the younger generation taking this radical stance. But I think, in general, people were a bit perplexed as to why you do this piece of work–and Beckwith himself described how absolutely fantastic it was and how excited he’d been, uh, doing the experiment–and then at the end of it, uh, kind of denounced yourselves in a press conference.
Alexis Pedrick: The first alarm bell had rung, and everyone pretty much kept going on about their business. Meanwhile, genetic engineering was only starting to pick up pace.
Chapter Two. The Second Alarm.
Alexis Pedrick: Across the country, a biochemist named Paul Berg was about to make the next breakthrough. Berg was the chair of biochemistry at Stanford and was well-respected in the field.
Protein Synthesis Archive – Paul Berg: Our genes carry the instructions for ordering the amino acids of each protein. Those instructions are encoded in a messenger molecule: mRNA.
Alexis Pedrick: He was in his mid-forties, clean, cut, handsome, played tennis, part of the so-called “square generation,” but that didn’t stop his students from really liking him. Berg was just starting to work on something he called “recombinant DNA.”
Matthew Cobb: And that’s a very strange term because we are all recombinants. DNA has been recombined from the DNA of our parents. We’re not identical to them, right? What they meant was recombinants between different species or even completely different classes or, uh, kingdoms.
Alexis Pedrick: Some people took to calling these recombinants chimeras, referencing a creature from Greek mythology that’s a combination of animals, like, for example, a monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a dragon’s tail. But Paul Berg’s goal wasn’t to make weird hybrid creatures. For him, making these recombinants was a means to an end. This is him telling Robert MacNeil from the MacNeil/Lehrer Report why he was doing this work.
McNeil/Lehrer Report – Paul Berg: In my view, the most practical benefit that will come from this type of research is the knowledge that we’ll gain about the structure and workings of human chromosomes and the genetic apparatus.
Alexis Pedrick: And here’s Janet Mertz, a graduate student in Berg’s lab in the 1970s, giving her take.
Janet Mertz: It was all a big black box. I was excited about the possibility that it would enable us to begin to understand how life worked at the same type of level that chemists and physicists were able to understand things.
Alexis Pedrick: Berg wanted to combine a virus called SV40, or Simian Virus 40, with a bacterial gene. Now, that combo was the chimera, or the recombinant, but the next step was what he was really interested in. He wanted to put this new SV40-bacteria combo into a mammal, so scientists could study gene function in mammals, which we really didn’t know anything about. The bacteria Berg wanted to use was a staple in every biology lab.
NOVA The Gene Engineers – Narrator: It’s called Escherichia coli: E. coli for short. It’s the most studied organism on Earth. In part, because it’s so cooperative. A single E. coli in a drop of water will multiply itself enormously if given a few simple chemicals to eat, and if it’s kept warm and gently shaken. In a day, the original bacterium can become 100 billion.
Alexis Pedrick: To insert the genetic material from E Coli into the SV40 genome, they used enzymes to cut open the SV40 gene. It was an extremely time consuming and tricky process, but they successfully did it.I mean, they made a new novel organism. This was the first recombinant DNA. When Janet Mertz joined Berg’s lab in 1970, she was only the second woman to join Stanford’s biochemistry department in a decade, and Berg called her smart as hell. One of the first things she did was invert the experiment. Instead of putting bacteria genes into a virus, what if she put virus genes into bacteria? This had an advantage; because E. coli, like most bacteria, has something called a plasmid.
NOVA The Gene Engineers – Narrator: An E. coli bacterium ruptured with detergent lies with its DNA strewn around it. But also in the photograph, magnified a hundred thousand times, is a tiny loop of extra DNA called a plasmid.
Alexis Pedrick: Plasmids replicate independently. That is, they make copies of themselves. So do viruses. But they both need to be inside a living organism to do it. In the original experiment, the SV40 virus was the copying engine, but now they could use the plasmid as the engine that creates copies of the recombinant. That means the bacteria would be like a mini factory pumping out millions of exact replicas of a piece of DNA. Janet Mertz had a great insight about the enzymes. Remember, it was a tricky and time consuming process. They needed six different kinds of enzymes to make cutting and pasting actually work.
Janet Mertz: So it was a very complicated, complex procedure. We weren’t worried about anyone else in the world trying to do it. Because with something that required six enzymes, there was probably no other place that had all six enzymes in their hands at the same time to even try the protocol.
Alexis Pedrick: But Mertz figured out a way to do it with just two.
Janet Mertz: It was my eureka moment. It obviously felt amazing. You know, making recombinant DNA went from being something that probably no one outside Stanford University could do to something that a bright high school student might be able to do for a science project.
Alexis Pedrick: Janet Mertz had her recombinants, and she was so close to cloning. All she had to do was insert that hybrid into a living organism and watch it multiply. Except she never got to that step. In June of 1971, Janet took a summer course at Cold Spring Harbor, the mecca of genetic studies on Long Island. She wanted to learn more about viruses. Her teacher was Robert Pollack, a young postdoctoral virologist. And if you wanna understand his vibe, there’s a great photo of him from 1983 with a chinstrap beard, messenger bag, and aviator-style glasses. Mertz excitedly described her experiment to the class, but Bob Pollack wasn’t intrigued. He was alarmed. This is him in the 2003 PBS documentary Playing God.
Playing God – Bob Pollack: I posed to her the simple question whether she had thought about the fact that, uh, she was bridging evolutionary barriers that had existed since the last common ancestors of bacteria and people.
Alexis Pedrick: Pollack was worried because SV40 was known to cause cancer in hamsters.
Matthew Cobb: And if it were to cause cancer, this could be terrifying because everybody’s got E. coli in them. And this is very transmissible. And so, my God, we’ve got an epidemic of cancer. This is, again, the kind of fears of the implications of the research.
Playing God – Bob Pollack: I called Paul Berg, and we had two conversations. The first of which was very abrupt, and, uh, I don’t think a phone conversation can be thought of as violent, but it was unpleasant.
NOVA Archive – Paul Berg: My initial reaction was, first of all, surprise. And then as I thought about it a bit, I thought it was even more outrageous than my initial reaction.
Janet Mertz: You know, and Berg originally, when Pollack called, said, “You know, who is this kook? I don’t know him, you know.”
Matthew Cobb: Berg told him to get lost. I think the terms he used were a bit stronger, but neither man would tell me what they were. You can probably imagine.
Alexis Pedrick: Bob Pollack was 14 years younger, and a mere post-doc, in comparison to the well-established Paul Berg. But despite Berg’s square looks, he also had some lefty credentials.
Matthew Cobb: Berg had been on big anti-war demonstrations, gone to Washington to protest.
Alexis Pedrick: And he loved art, especially abstract expressionism, aka the cool kids of painting. And he did things like make this very avant-garde instructional film with his students. The film starts with Paul Berg dressed like, well, almost every depiction of a male scientist you’ve ever seen, collared shirt and tie, pens in the front pocket. There’s a chalkboard behind him, and some 3D molecular models in front of him.
Protein Synthesis Archive – Paul Berg: Only rarely is there an opportunity to participate in a molecular happening. This film attempts to portray symbolically, yet in a dynamic and joyful way, one of nature’s fundamental processes. Protein synthesis is a dynamic process. This movie tries to bring those dynamic interactions to life.
Protein Synthesis Archive: …Ribosome did gire and gimble…
Alexis Pedrick: The film cuts to an outdoor scene, a large grassy field eventually filled with 50, 80 dancing and twirling, possibly stoned, and, or, tripping students who are acting out the process of protein synthesis through dance. Think Hair, the American tribal love rock musical. Janet Mertz played the part of a ribosome in the performance–completely sober, she swears. And why am I telling you about any of this? Besides the camp of it all, which is admittedly an excellent reason. Because I enter this protein synthesis video into evidence to argue that Paul Berg had an open mind, and he started thinking about the implications of his experiment.
Matthew Cobb: He talked to friends, colleagues, lawyers, philosophers, who were in his social circle, and they all went, “is this really a good idea?”
NOVA The Gene Engineers – Paul Berg: And although it was clear there was no hard data… nevertheless, I couldn’t convince myself that it was totally without any risk. And since I felt that while I would be willing to take the risk of doing such an experiment, if I was the only one to be exposed, I began to think in terms of whether it was my prerogative to, in fact, make that decision for other people who worked with me and around me. And we decided not to carry on this experiment any further.
Alexis Pedrick : In December of 1971, Paul Berg voluntarily halted the experiments in his own lab. Janet Mertz was disappointed, to say the least.
Janet Mertz: It obviously was a little distressing to have people say, “we’re gonna put a moratorium on your project.” I thought it was a really good project. I was just a lowly grad student at the time, and as I say, it was above my pay grade.
Alexis Pedrick: There was nothing she could do. She had to move on. One of the biggest advances in molecular biology occurred and then abruptly stopped. It should have been big news, but it wasn’t. The second alarm bell had rung, but not many people heard it.
Matthew Cobb: There was still no real concern. Nobody really–you know, the public didn’t know about this. The big change came the following year when Stanley Cohen and Herb Boyer used a slightly different, much more simple technique, which is generally known as cloning. That meant, as Berg put it, now anybody can do anything. And that’s when people started to really worry.
Chapter Three. The Third Alarm.
Alexis Pedrick: In 1972, there was another group working on recombinant DNA at Stanford, led by a scientist named Stanley Cohen. He was in his mid-thirties. He wore glasses, had a beard, and was balding. He moved to Stanford from the East coast for a dual appointment in medicine and genetics, and he was about to make the next breakthrough. We visited Stan in his lab at Stanford. He’s now 90.
Mariel Carr: Do you still come into the lab every day?
Stanley Cohen: I do most days, yes. Because I love what I’m doing. I can’t, uh, imagine a life without, doing science.
Alexis Pedrick: Stan showed us around his lab. Then we had lunch and sat down for the interview.
Mariel Carr: I was wondering if you could just start by telling us, like, what were you setting out to do?
Stanley Cohen: …Shouldn’t have eaten such a big sandwich.
Interviewers laugh.
Alexis Pedrick: Don’t worry. He got there.
Stanley Cohen: I was setting out to understand antibiotic resistance. It was a serious medical problem, and people were dying from it.
Alexis Pedrick: An experience in medical school left a huge impression on him.
Stanley Cohen: There was a medical resident that died from a bacterial infection, and the bacterium that was causing the infection was resistant to all treatments. It was not possible to find a treatment that worked, and he died from the infection.
Alexis Pedrick: That’s how Stan became interested in plasmids, because, in addition to being self-replicating, plasmids also give bacteria resistance to antibiotics. Stan wanted to know everything he could about plasmids, and in order to do that, he wanted to clone them.
Stanley Cohen: In order to study something, you really, can’t just have one. You need exact copies. For example, if you had a single grain of sugar or a grain of salt, it would be difficult to study its characteristics. It’s hard to do anything with one because if you’re going to rip it apart, you’ve destroyed it, and you’ve lost your one.
Alexis Pedrick: In 1972, Stan organized a conference in Honolulu about plasmids, and he invited an enzyme specialist from UC San Francisco named Herb Boyer. Now, Herb Boyer was around the same age as Stan Cohen but had a totally different style. His round boyish face was framed by a mop of curly hair and punctuated by a mustache. He liked wearing leather vests and jeans, but despite his cool exterior, he was a true science nerd. He idolized Watson and Crick, even naming his two Siamese cats after them. Now Boyer had already sent an enzyme to Paul Berg’s lab. So he was familiar with recombinant DNA. One night Cohen and Boyer went out in search of a late night snack and stumbled upon a Jewish deli.
Stanley Cohen: Instead of the usual “Aloha,” it said, “Shalom.” And, inside there were people eating fatly stuffed deli sandwiches. We went in, and I proposed a collaboration. And we sketched out an experimental plan on napkins and came back and began the experiments that led to DNA cloning.
NOVA The Gene Engineers – Narrator: To the E. coli plasmids are added plasmids from a different species of bacteria.
Alexis Pedrick: Unlike Berg’s lab, which was mixing a virus with bacteria, Cohen and Boyer wanted to mix one bacterial plasmid with another bacterial plasmid, and they wanted to take the next step, insert the new recombinant into a living organism, and hope that the plasmid does what it does best and replicate itself.
NOVA The Gene Engineers – Narrator: E coli plasmids re-form with fragments from the second plasmid tucked within them. The result is a few hybrid plasmids made of the recombined DNA of two different species of bacteria. But separated plasmids are not alive. To grow, they must be put back into the E. coli.
Alexis Pedrick: Cohen and Boyer watched as the extra bit of DNA they stuck in began to replicate, too.
Stanley Cohen: That taught us that we could clone DNA, that DNA that doesn’t have the capacity to reproduce can be reproduced, and lots of copies of it can be made by linking it to a plasmid and putting it into a cell. We were excited. We were more than excited! Herb told me he cried when he saw the images on gels. It was a very memorable experience.
Alexis Pedrick: This is Herb Boyer.
Herb Boyer: I can still visualize it. It was, uh, overwhelming. I often described it as having tears coming to my eyes. I remember taking a photograph of these gels home and showed it to my wife. And I told her this is going to allow me to get an advancement in my pay grade at the university, get promoted to an associate professor.
Alexis Pedrick: It was another one of those incremental steps in genetic engineering. Jonathan Beckwith and others had proven that they could make and manipulate DNA. Paul Berg had combined the DNA from multiple species, but it was Stanley Cohen and Herb Boyer who took the next step, the big one. They’d cloned something. Now, exactly what happened next is a bit up for debate–one version says that Cohen and Boyer agreed to keep their findings secret until they published, but Boyer let the cat out of the bag at a conference in the summer of 1973. But Herb Boyer remembers things differently.
Herb Boyer: I remember very, very clearly that I said, “Stan, I’m going to talk about this.” And so Stan, I assumed, or at least I remember, that he was positive about that, although later he complained about it quite a bit. But, I presented it at the end of the conference. And it was extremely–a trying moment because I had made the slides up myself using a Polaroid camera–those primitive stages of making slides for presentations. And so I got them all together at the last minute, put them in a box and I got them all confused. So the presentation was sort of like middle first, first in the middle, and the end at the end. And so, I think despite all that bumbling around that I did, it came across as a significant step forward in molecular biology.
Alexis Pedrick: Nevertheless, some scientists got alarmed. The meeting was the Gordon Research Conference, and it was organized by one of the only female molecular biologists on the scene: Maxine Singer. Maxine Singer was a close friend of Paul Berg’s–in fact she was one of those close friends he reached out to when he decided to halt his own experiments. So when some of the younger scientists at the Gordon Conference told her they were concerned about Boyer’s experiment, she took it to heart.
Matthew Cobb: It was an informal discussion with younger generation students. It’s people in their late twenties who were part of that radical generation who’ve been radicalized by May ’68 in Europe and the Vietnam War and all the rest of it. They’re saying, “why are we doing this? This is really, really worrying.”
Alexis Pedrick: Singer organized a brief debate, right there at the conference, and it became clear that the alarm was widespread. Once again, there was the concern for the potential for biohazards. They were making many copies of plasmids that caused resistance to antibiotics. What if they got out and caused an epidemic of antibiotic resistance? Other people brought up the fear of biological warfare.Maxine Singer and her co-organizer wrote a letter–now called the “Singer-Soll Letter”–to the National Academy of Sciences. It warned of this line of research’s unpredictability, and how it might “prove hazardous to laboratory workers and to the public.” It was published in Science in 1973. But just like the second alarm, all this anxiety was still happening mostly outside of the public eye. Even some veteran science reporters didn’t have this growing controversy on their radar. But that would soon change.
Victor McElheny: I’m Victor McElheny. I’ve been a science reporter since the 1950s, and, learning about recombinant DNA was kind of an accident for me. All of this was developing, but it only surfaced for me in April of ’74.
Alexis Pedrick: McElheny learned about both the science and the controversy at the same time. He had called up some scientists in his Rolodex about a completely unrelated story, but they pointed him in a different direction.
Victor McElheny: There’s something else you need to know about. So they then told me a couple of things. One was that there was a package of techniques called recombinant DNA. They also said that one week from this day, which was April 10th, 1974, that there would be a meeting at MIT of a small committee that was considering an appeal for a moratorium on two or three types of experiments about which there was some concern about the safety of laboratory workers. So I was tipped not only to the existence of these technologies, but also to the fact that scientists were considering the risk of them.
Alexis Pedrick: McElheny caught up fast. And he would become the primary reporter for recombinant DNA controversy for The New York Times. But first he had to catch his readers up to what this science even was.
Victor McElheny: I made a personal decision. I did not consult with editors at the paper. I just made the decision I’m going to to do my first story on the scientific achievement.
Alexis Pedrick: It had a sort of “this new science will help humanity” vibe. Besides the original cloning experiment, McElheny described another groundbreaking experiment done by Stan Cohen’s lab. After successfully combining two kinds of bacteria, they decided to branch out to animals. Specifically, they transplanted a gene from a South African clawed frog into E. coli.
PBS Playing God – Jeff Goldblum: A single bacterium multiplied rapidly into millions. Each an identical copy of the original. Here was a living factory, churning out fragments of toad. One life form manufacturing bits of another.
Alexis Pedrick: Does the narrator from this PBS documentary sound familiar? It’s none other than Jeff Goldblum, our favorite skeptical chaos theorist. Except here he sounds less skeptical and more giddy.
PBS Playing God – Jeff Goldblum: One life form manufacturing bits of another. This experiment was a turning point in biology. Genetic engineering was born.
Alexis Pedrick: Jeff Goldblum musing on the wonders of genetic engineering. We’ve truly come full circle. Victor McElheny’s New York Times story was a turning point in the public knowing about recombinant DNA and cloning. People were finally listening, and for Paul Berg in that small committee at MIT, the pressure was on to do something.
Chapter Four. The Fourth Alarm.
Alexis Pedrick: It wasn’t just articles in the newspaper that were adding to the pressure.
Victor McElheny: The jungle telegraph is humming. People are calling Stan and other people asking for experimental materials to share. Uh, in fact, Cohen was bombarded and other people in the field were also.
NOVA The Gene Engineers – Stanley Cohen: Even before the first experiments were published, word began to get around among the scientific community.
Alexis Pedrick: This is Stan Cohen in the 1977 NOVA documentary, The Gene Engineers.
NOVA The Gene Engineers – Stanley Cohen: And at that time, the plasmid we used was the only one known to be usable for these kinds of experiments. And we began to get letters from our scientific colleagues who wanted to use the plasmid in their own experiments. We were concerned that some of the uses might be potentially hazardous.
Alexis Pedrick: Paul Berg had a similar experience.
Paul Berg – Asilomar Tapes: The telephone calls were coming to us daily. Send us PSE 101. What do you want to do? You get a description of some kind of a horror experiment, and you asked the person whether in fact he thought about it, and you found that he hadn’t really thought about it in that way.
Alexis Pedrick: Berg, of course, had been in the exact same position two years earlier when he used some colorful language on the phone with Bob Pollack. But he got it now, and he realized not everyone did.
Victor McElheny: If you felt a concern that certain experiments should be delayed, then you had to tell the community that in a way that would reach it. That meant a public letter.
Matthew Cobb: They publish a letter, we call on everybody who’s using this new technique to stop.
Alexis Pedrick: 11 scientists signed the letter including Herb Boyer, Stanley Cohen, James Watson–yes, that James Watson–and a soon to be Nobel laureate named David Baltimore. This so-called “Berg Letter” was published in Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The group then held a press conference in Washington on July 18th, 1974. On the same day as the press conference, Victor McElheny’s second recombinant DNA article came out in The New York Times. It was just two months after his first story, but this one struck a very different tone. It was titled “Genetic Tests Renounced Over Possible Hazards.” Other newspapers had even scarier slants. San Francisco Chronicle reporter David Perlman wrote an article titled “A Danger in Manmade Bacteria.” For years, the recombinant DNA controversy had taken place between scientists. But now the media was tuned in.
Victor McElheny: I mean, after all, from the public point of view, biology does not exist just to advance knowledge. It exists to confer benefit, to make agriculture more productive, to make the food healthier, to make people’s lives longer. To save the baby’s life.
Alexis Pedrick: Paul Berg became the face of recombinant DNA research over the years. He would explain repeatedly why he was calling for a stop to his own work. This is him on The MacNeil/Lehrer Report.
MacNeil/Lehrer Report: Doctor, you were the one who got this, this particular kind of research started, and then you spoke out about the possible dangers of it. What happened to case you to do that? Well, we could foresee that there was going to be great interest in this technique, and that many people were excited about the opportunities that was created by it. We could also see that some of the experiments that might be done might, perhaps, create some dangerous situations. We were not sure that we could answer all the possibilities, and so we called for scientists throughout the world to pause, to temporarily defer certain experiments until we could meet to discuss the nature of the possible hazards and the kinds of experiments that could or should not be done.
Alexis Pedrick: We now call this pause a moratorium. But the M word was never actually used in the letter itself.
Matthew Cobb: But it kind of seeped into the discussion. It’s really interesting where that word comes from. It comes from the debates over atomic weapons. So there’s a connection between this really alarming, terrifying, destructive technology of nuclear weapons and the tiny individual, almost craft-based techniques of molecular genetics that were being developed.
Alexis Pedrick: We asked Matthew Cobb if he thought these scientists were trying to prevent history from repeating itself
Matthew Cobb: I don’t think people were quite so kind of priggish as to think, “Well, we’re gonna get it right, where the physicists got it wrong.” But I think it was there in their heads, and you can see that by the use of these words, right? That’s not a neutral thing.
Alexis Pedrick: There were a whole range of reactions to the Berg Letter. There was the “how noble, scientists standing up and doing the right thing” kind of take. The Washington Post even wrote, “Scientific research and experimentation is surely not a matter for the police to control. The best we can hope for is that the collective conscience of scientists themselves asserts itself.” As far as the response from scientists, well, some didn’t think the letter went far enough and wanted a complete ban, and others were furious at even the suggestion of any limits to what they saw as their academic freedom. The Berg Letter got people’s attention, but what next? In the letter itself, they wrote…
Matthew Cobb: And we will have a meeting in about eight months time in which we will discuss what to do.
Alexis Pedrick: The meeting would take place on the Monterey Peninsula in Pacific Grove, California, at the Asilomar Conference grounds.
Matthew Cobb: Asilomar was intended to be a way of resolving what became known as the moratorium. So they’ve made this decision that we’re gonna call on everybody to stop doing the experiments. And they could do that because basically they knew everybody. You know, it’s a pretty small world back then.
Alexis Pedrick: The plan was to gather and come to a consensus about what the heck to do. Next episode: we’ll fast forward eight months and tell you what happened at that meeting.
Alexis Pedrick: Distillations podcast is produced by the Science History Institute and recorded in the Laurie J. Landeau Digital Production Studios. Our executive producer is Mariel Carr. Our producer is Rigoberto Hernandez, and our associate producer is Sarah Kaplan. This episode was reported by Rigoberto Hernandez and Mariel Carr, and mixed by Jonathan Pfeffer, who also composed the theme music. Support for Distillations has been provided by the Middleton Foundation and the Wyncote Foundation.
Alexis Pedrick: You can find all of our podcasts as well as our videos and articles on our website at sciencehistory.org, and you can follow us on social media at SciHistoryOrg for news about our podcast and everything else going on in our free museum and library. For distillations. I’m Alexis Pedrick. Thanks for listening.
Part Two:
Alexis Pedrick: From the Science History Institute, I’m Alexis Pedrick, and this is Distillations. This episode is the second part of a two-part series, so if you haven’t listened to part one yet, go listen. In Part One, we covered the slow burn of the recombinant DNA controversy, starting with the first rumbling of potential danger in 1969, and ending at the big turning point in 1974, when Paul Berg and a handful of other molecular biologists signed the Berg Letter, which called for a moratorium on recombinant DNA research. To put it in terms of Jurassic Park, the T-Rex had not yet escaped. It’s not even rattling its cage yet, but scientists are worried that it could. Here’s Paul Berg on The MacNeil/Lehrer Report.
MacNeil/Lehrer Report – Paul Berg: Well, we could foresee that some of the experiments that might be done might, perhaps, create some dangerous situations. We were not sure that we could answer all the possibilities, and so we called for scientists throughout the world to pause.
Alexis Pedrick: Now we said this in Part One, and we’ll say it again. An entire field of science collectively standing up and saying, “we’re worried our work is dangerous, and we think we should stop doing it for now” was unprecedented, but the next part was harder: the solving part. How do you solve a problem like this? For scientists there was really only one option .
Matthew Cobb: So initially Berg and the organizers assumed this was just gonna be a conference, right?
Alexis Pedrick: A science conference, that is. This is Matthew Cobb, by the way, the zoologist and author we met in Part One.
Matthew Cobb: They thought would just be a kind of, you know, them and their mates. Because basically Paul Berg draws up a list of pals of about nearly 200 people from around the world. But because of the growing awareness of what they were gonna be doing, plus the kind of thought of, “Well, wait a minute, these are people deciding this really important thing for the world, shouldn’t somebody know about it?” So journalists, then asked, “can we come?”
Alexis Pedrick: Ultimately 140 scientists, a handful of non-scientists, and 16 reporters that spanned the spectrum from nerdy to mainstream media, came to the International Conference on Recombinant DNA Molecules, otherwise known as Asilomar, because that’s the name of the conference center where it took place. And if you asked someone today, out of all the esteemed publications that covered the conference, which one truly captured what happened there? They’ll say Rolling Stone, and its nine-page spread–broken up by ads for Grateful Dead T-shirts and a cassette tape repair service–was written by a recent college graduate, just 22 years old.
Michael Rogers: My name is Michael Rogers, and I’m an author, a journalist, and a futurist.
Alexis Pedrick: Our producers, Mariel and Rigo, interviewed Michael Rogers at his home in downtown Brooklyn, where he gave them his latest book.
Michael Rogers: Would you like a copy of Email from the Future? I just got a new shipment in.
Alexis Pedrick: And showed them his fossil collection.
Michael Rogers: This is a petrified tree trunk from Argentina.
Alexis Pedrick: In 1975, Michael Rogers had just graduated from Stanford with one degree in physics and one in creative writing, and he landed a job at Rolling Stone.
Michael Rogers: So I went to Rolling Stone and had a great time at first doing movie stars and rock stars. And then the owner of Rolling Stone, Jann Wenner, discovered I had a background in science, and this was right when Rolling Stone was trying to become a broader interest publication. So Jann Wenner said, “You’re gonna be our science writer.” And I said “I really would like to do, you know, rock and roll.” And he said, “Michael, anyone can interview Stevie Nicks, but only you can explain recombinant DNA.”
Alexis Pedrick: So Michael packed his bags and drove to the conference. And quickly realized he was the youngest reporter there.
Michael Rogers: Every single person there, I think, was pretty well established as a science writer, and I was not. On the other hand, you know, being from Rolling Stone was a great conversation starter. And there weren’t that many people under the age of, say 35, there, but the ones that were, were very open to talking to Rolling Stone.
Alexis Pedrick: The goal of the meeting was to come to a consensus about how to end the eight-month-long moratorium. How to get the experiments going again, but safely. Today, Asilomar is often mentioned breathlessly, with an air of reverence. Scientists tackled the big ethical issues themselves, but this isn’t exactly true.
Matthew Cobb: The mistaken popular image that they all got together and discussed ethics and, you know, was it dangerous or not? No, it was really a technical, kind of boring discussion.
Alexis Pedrick: As scientists, it makes complete sense that they focused on scientific solutions. The trouble was, no matter how they sliced things, this wasn’t just a scientific problem. Asilomar is a famously beautiful and rustic conference center. It was once a Young Women’s Christian Association camp. Picture a lot of wood paneling and exposed beams. And the conference sort of felt like summer camp. People took long walks on the beach, they were booked two to a room, except instead of campers, they were scientists from some of the most elite laboratories around the world.
David Baltimore – Asilomar Tapes: There are something on the order of 86 American scientists and 53 foreign scientists, coming from about 16 countries.
Alexis Pedrick: And in case any of the scientists needed a reminder of the seriousness of the task before them, they just had to look around. Starting with the chapel where the conference sessions took place.
Michael Rogers: It struck me that, you know, that we were sitting in a chapel. We were next to the ocean where life started, and we’re discussing, you know, how to proceed with the actual ability to manipulate life in a way that we had never had as humans.
Alexis Pedrick: When he described this scene in his article, Michael Rogers added, quote, rarely does one find one’s metaphors so apt or so cheap. Michael wasn’t just in awe of the setting, he was pretty impressed by the attendees, too.
Michael Rogers: Two Nobel laureates were there—James Watson and Joshua Lederberg.
Alexis Pedrick: One of the organizers was a renowned biologist from South Africa named Sydney Brenner.
Sydney Brenner – Asilomar Tapes: Science has got its inbuilt pauses. When the problems are difficult, there are very long pauses. Sometimes they last for 100 years. The thing about this is that it has made a number of things which were technically difficult: easy.
Alexis Pedrick: Another organizer was molecular biologist Maxine Singer. She co-wrote the Singer-Soll Letter in 1973. Stan Cohen and Herb Boyer, who did the first successful cloning experiment in 1972, were also there. Jonathan Beckwith, who denounced his own work in 1969, was not there. He wasn’t even on the original invite list. He was only offered a spot when Bob Pollock, who had the infamous phone call with Paul Berg, turned down his spot and suggested Beckwith go in his place. But Beckwith didn’t want to be the only person who thought that work should halt altogether, so he declined. And the activist group Science for the People sent an open letter to the meeting, which described the whole thing as akin to, quote, asking the tobacco industry to limit the manufacture of cigarettes.
All of which is to say that the meeting was comprised of an intentionally narrow group of people with an intentionally narrow agenda.
Michael’s story had details no other story did. He wrote the scientists as characters, as people. He humanized them.
Michael Rogers: I remember one scientist coming in and he was assigned his roommate, and his roommate said, well, I can’t room with you because, you know, I’m a microbiologist, you know? And you’re into agronomy. And the other one says, well, I’m an insomniac, really. And the first one says, okay, that’s fine.
Alexis Pedrick: So with this motley crew settled in, the meeting began.
Chapter One: Monday
Alexis Pedrick: On Monday morning, the metaphorical hourglass had been flipped over and the sand was pouring down. There were just three and a half days to figure out what to do.
David Baltimore – Asilomar Tapes: We are trying to develop a document which will provide guidance to anybody in the world.
Alexis Pedrick: But before scientists could dive in, some logistics had to be addressed.
Victor McElheny: The very first day of the conference at the first session, all the reporters opened their tape recorders. This caused an immediate frozen moment of horror in the conference.
Alexis Pedrick: In his opening remarks, David Baltimore noted the elephants in the room. Baltimore was the MIT scientist who gathered everyone in his office to write the Berg letter, and he was one of the conference organizers.
David Baltimore – Asilomar Tapes: You’ll notice that there are 16 members of the International Press Corps here.
Alexis Pedrick: There was immediate paranoia about the press, dampened only slightly by this assurance.
David Baltimore – Asilomar Tapes: They are here under an agreement not to publish anything until the meeting is complete.
Matthew Cobb: The journalists wanted to file stories, and the meeting said no, the condition is you can only file a story at the end. So we’re in a world with no phones or no mobile phones, no internet.
Alexis Pedrick: David Baltimore tried to reassure the scientists, even going so far as to remind them to just try and ignore everyone but their fellow scientists.
David Baltimore – Asilomar Tapes: I want to ask the speakers not attempt to talk down to laymen who may be in the audience, but rather this is a scientific meeting, and we should talk to each other as scientists.
Alexis Pedrick: But this did little to calm nerves. Stan Cohen was especially stressed. This is him in an oral history, years later.
Stanley Cohen: Most of us were not that used to dealing with the press, and it was a sobering experience. I found myself edgy. I didn’t want to talk to the press. One of the reporters, I think for Rolling Stone or one of those magazines, talked about one scientist when confronted with a photographer’s camera, put a hat over his face in the style of a newly busted member of the mafioso. And that struck home because I was the person that he referred to in the article, even though he didn’t mention me by name.
Michael Rogers: I think the paranoia was, you know, whose research is going to get dented by this? I mean, literally, you know, careers could have been at stake. I think that not until the end was there real concern about what the public reaction would be. It was really more a question of what will this do to my work?
Victor McElheny: This was an extraordinarily anguished week. This was not some happy little parliament. There were a lot of younger scientists who were observing this. Their faces had gone ashen. They could see their scientific future disappearing in a cloud of smoke.
Alexis Pedrick: But it wasn’t just their individual careers that were threatened. A whole scientific field was also in jeopardy.
Victor McElheny: What was at stake was foreclosing a very large area of research with immense promise of utility in the detection, palliation, cure of disease.
Alexis Pedrick: But the stakes were also high if the research resumed with no restrictions and it did turn out to be dangerous. There were also the big fears of eugenics and biological warfare. But right away, David Baltimore said they weren’t going to deal with any of that.
Matthew Cobb: Baltimore makes this statement at the beginning, says, we are not going to discuss either medical applications of this, we’re not going to discuss commercial applications, and we’re not going to discuss bio-weapons. They were ruled off the agenda. So they actually exclude some of the key ethical issues and the focus, not the sole focus, but the primary focus of the meeting was, I mean, when you look at it, it was really bizarre, right?
Herb Boyer – Asilomar Tapes: Looking at the kinetics of methylation as a function.
Matthew Cobb: Academics droning on about their rather boring discoveries that they’re very excited and proud about. Hey, I’ve done this amazing experiment. Gee whiz.
Alexis Pedrick: Scientists went on and on in never ending sessions, often talking right through the chapel bell.
Unknown Scientist – Asilomar Tapes: But the important thing to think about is where do these enzymes come from?
Alexis Pedrick: And just to be clear, it sounds like technical language to me, but to the scientists, the excitement was palpable. This is Alex Capron, one of the few non-scientists who attended the conference.
Alex Capron: There was a single payphone, and after every one of the sessions, there would be a line. And I was curious and so I must say, I stood nearby and did a little eavesdropping. And these were people calling to their colleagues back at their institutions, saying, I just heard so and so talk about this thing and as soon as I get back, let’s get going.
Alexis Pedrick: Everyone at Asilomar had withheld from recombinant DNA research for eight months, and now scientists wanted to get going again.
Alex Capron: There was almost no conversation among the general attendees about the need for limits and caution and so forth, and how we’re going to regulate this or what we’re going to do. It was all about “this is so exciting.”
Alexis Pedrick: But the organizers stressed the need to get going again responsibly.
Sydney Brenner – Asilomar Tapes: What I would like to do, certainly to erect as high barriers as possible between my laboratory where this work goes on and people outside it.
Alexis Pedrick: The clock was ticking. They had to move beyond the excitement of science and start dealing with the problem.
Chapter Two: Tuesday.
Michael Rogers: Early on, someone said to me, we know how to do a scientific conference, right?
Alexis Pedrick: Tuesday started off with more science. Until a renowned microbiologist broke the ice.
Stanley Falkow – Asilomar Tapes: Thus far, most of the speakers have carefully avoided the question of biohazards. But that’s what this meeting is about. And that’s what we have to discuss this morning.
Alexis Pedrick: But when Paul Berg tried to steer the conversation in this direction, all enthusiasm evaporated.
Paul Berg – Asilomar Tapes: We’re trying to come up with your reactions and suggestions, and I think I’d like to encourage you and try to eliminate any shyness or uneasiness about speaking out. So who’ll be the first?
Alexis Pedrick: The next session on designing safe vectors was more spirited.
Sydney Brenner – Asilomar Tapes: And we have a plethora of ideas.
Alexis Pedrick: Designing a safe vector, otherwise known as disarming the bug, was the ultimate tech fix. The vector or bug being E.coli, which was the bacteria all recombinant DNA experiments relied on. In other words, instead of making a rule that said don’t make a T-Rex, what if you engineered a T-Rex that would die as soon as it escaped the paddock?
Sydney Brenner – Asilomar Tapes: Such that anything escaping from that. Preferably undergoes instant death with high probability or if it should survive, would be unable to grow, unable to multiply, unable to change itself so that it would receive these capacities. Do you see what I mean?
Alexis Pedrick: People chimed in eagerly.
Unknown Scientist – Asilomar Tapes: We have succeeded in communicating prospects of technical improvements with respect to the vectors, the bacterial hosts.
Alexis Pedrick: This is Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg.
Joshua Lederberg – Asilomar Tapes: I wanted to predict what the technical opportunities were likely to be in the very near future.
Alexis Pedrick: And this is David Baltimore, who would soon have a Nobel Prize of his own.
David Baltimore – Asilomar Tapes: We had a very productive series of sessions at this meeting about the design of safe vectors.
Alexis Pedrick: For a while, it seemed like the future of recombinant DNA research hinged on the creation of this hypothetical harmless E.coli. I mean, if two Nobel laureates plus a microbiologist who speaks in poetry tell you something is the answer, it probably is, right? But Stan Cohen went out on a limb and pointed out how precarious this all was.
Stanley Cohen – Asilomar Tapes: The general comments that are made about safer vectors and have sort of a tone of, well, let’s wait for the Messiah.
Alexis Pedrick: And then the anxiety floodgates opened.
David Baltimore – Asilomar Tapes: I need from this meeting some sort of indication about whether this sort of thing is feasible or shouldn’t be done at all. I’d hate to go home in any doubt about it.
Unknown Scientist – Asilomar Tapes: This is a moratorium now to which no end can be seen at all, because who is going to say when a vector is safe? In whose hands are we putting this trust now?
Alexis Pedrick: Just one and a half more days to go. And they were nowhere close to an answer.
Michael Rogers: One of the scientists said something along the lines of, you know, we’re dealing with these enormous problems and there’s no goddamn Moses in sight.
Chapter Three: Wednesday
Alexis Pedrick: By Wednesday, things were getting a little chaotic.
Sydney Brenner – Asilomar Tapes: The correct thing to do is to proceed with caution.
Unknown Scientist – Asilomar Tapes: But what’s the definition of caution?
Sydney Brenner – Asilomar Tapes: Well, let me just say what caution is.
Unknown Scientist – Asilomar Tapes: I mean, isn’t that really the heart of this conference? And what nobody can really agree to as to what caution is?
Michael Rogers: There was not a strong push from the floor for, you know, what are the rules and how do we do this?
Alexis Pedrick: They described their research in detail, talked about disarming the bug, but now the race was on to come to some conclusions. And it was the last full day of the conference. This is David Baltimore.
David Baltimore – Asilomar Tapes: If we don’t come to some consensus, if we find ourselves terribly split along any of a number of lines I can imagine, I would just point out that there is no one else to appeal to. And if we come out of here split and unhappy, then we have really failed the mission of that.
Alexis Pedrick: The clock was ticking.
Michael Rogers: They had to come out with an outcome. There was no thought of: let’s just walk away from this. We have to produce something. Paul Berg was really the perfect person to be leading this because, you know, he was very well respected. He was so clean cut. And he was pretty casual in how he ran things.
Paul Berg – Asilomar Tapes: I think what I would like to do is to invite those people who think I am misunderstood or misstated that consensus to come and see us and express their views to us.
Alexis Pedrick: Throughout the conference. There had been conversations about risks versus benefits.
Unknown Scientist – Asilomar Tapes: As soon as the benefits appear, okay, then the threshold for the risks is changed.
Alexis Pedrick: Eventually, the conversation had turned to categorizing the risk level of various types of experiments.
Unknown Scientist – Asilomar Tapes: So it would seem to me that the containment conditions low and moderate and high…
Alexis Pedrick: Some people wanted low, medium, high, others wanted a numbered system, but there were some dissenters who wanted no regulations at all. Chief among them was James Watson. Here’s Matthew Cobb again.
Matthew Cobb: He went from signing the Berg letter, as it’s called in 1974, to saying we were crazy. I was a jackass, he said, to sign it. And during the meeting, he spent his time kind of being a naysayer, you know, heckling people, swearing, and just being a general jackass.
Alexis Pedrick: In one of the few times we hear Maxine Singer in the tapes, she asked James Watson why exactly he went from signing the Berg letter to opposing any regulations.
Maxine Singer – Asilomar Tapes: But I think for myself and perhaps for many others, it’s important to ask Jim in relation to what he said to us. It would be useful to have a summary of what has changed between last July and now.
Alexis Pedrick: We don’t hear a response from Watson on the tapes. But here’s how Victor McElheny sums up Watson’s stance.
Victor McElheny: Watson said, basically, you’ll be sorry. You’re asking for cops in the lab. You are talking about risks that are not quantifiable, and I’m not going to be put out of business by rules that have to do with risks that you can’t put a number on.
Matthew Cobb: What they were terrified of was the possibility that the state might then say, well, you can’t do this experiment. This is forbidden.
Alexis Pedrick: Other scientists were angry about being rushed to a decision.
Ephraim Anderson – Asilomar Tapes: You’re forcing the pace. You must allow the people here time to deliberate over these documents.
Michael Rogers: Berg was just moving things along as fast as he could. Often there’d be dissension from the audience, but not enough to keep it from moving forward.
Paul Berg – Asilomar Tapes: There’s a Thursday morning in which I’m trying to provoke a kind of response you made late tonight. I think you keep going round and round with the useless…
Matthew Cobb: Asilomar was a bit like that. I described it as a mixture of a scientific conference and a really fractious conference of student politics. Any listeners who’ve been involved in student politics know how awful that can be.
Alexis Pedrick: You can just imagine what it must have been like to be one of the reporters watching this unfold. And if you can’t, here’s some commentary from the reporter whose recordings you’ve been listening to.
David Perlman: Do you suppose all science policy gets made this way? Holy God, I never.
Alexis Pedrick: Just a note. This is the voice of David Perlman, who worked at the San Francisco Chronicle until 2017, when he was 98. He died just a few years later in 2020, at the age of 101. Thanks to his colleagues for helping us identify his voice.
David Perlman: Yeah, well, it just proves that these guys can be as precise and well defined in the laboratory, but they are no better off at making policy than anybody else. I won’t quarrel with that. I won’t, I won’t put them down for this. It’s just that there is no monopoly or no greater sense of wisdom here than there is in any other human enterprise. Jesus.
Chapter Four: Wednesday Evening
Alexis Pedrick: While Paul Berg was wrangling everything out front, Maxine Singer was pulling strings behind the scenes. You see, she’d had the insight to invite some lawyers to the conference to provide a little outside perspective. And thank goodness she did, because the scientists were struggling on their own.
Matthew Cobb: I mean, these are scientists, right? And scientists think they’re really smart and they understand everything. And then generally, when they meet politics, sociology, law, they discover that there’s this whole realm of knowledge of action that they have no understanding about and no purchase over. And every time that they kind of came up against this, they were generally a bit kind of perplexed and began to think, well, maybe we did the wrong thing. So they didn’t actually have the skill set for what they were trying to do. They weren’t experts in public health. So they’ve started a process which I think they all felt very quickly was escaping their control.
Alexis Pedrick: The legal panel was organized by Maxine Singer’s husband, Dan, who was a lawyer himself. And he invited three other lawyers to lead a session on Wednesday evening after dinner.
Matthew Cobb: Yeah. When they’re lawyers, I don’t mean like they’re people who do court cases for people who’ve been in a car accident. These are legal scholars. Let’s put it this way. They’ve got cross about that in the past. So they were academics who really understood their stuff. And they knew the law.
Alexis Pedrick: By the way, the lawyers were American and spoke about the American legal system because while Asilomar was an international meeting, most of the scientists were American, and the U.S. had become the default when the talk turned to regulations. Now the lawyers attended the whole conference. They’d listened to the endless presentations on plasmids, prokaryotes and eukaryotes, and designing a safe vector. And now, at the tail end of day three, they were ready to burst some bubbles.
Matthew Cobb: What really, according to the people who were there, put the fear of God into the scientists was on the penultimate evening. The lawyers are allowed to speak.
Alexis Pedrick: Maxine’s husband Dan made the opening remarks, and they were tame, even congratulatory.
Daniel Singer – Asilomar Tapes: The imposition of the moratorium is an exercise on your part of an unusually high level of public responsibility.
Alexis Pedrick: So far, so good. And then the second lawyer spoke. This is actually Alex Capron, who we heard from earlier.
Alex Capron – Asilomar Tapes: You have shown a rare willingness to engage in the process of problem recognition and assessment.
Alexis Pedrick: But then things took a turn.
Alex Capron – Asilomar Tapes: But before I turn your head with too many compliments, I’d like to give you an outsider’s view of the meeting this week. We were called here to discuss the biohazards of recombinant DNA and by what means they could be minimized. Perhaps the tone of the meeting was set, however, when David Baltimore declared at the outset that this was to be a scientific meeting, and indeed, to an outsider at least, it often seemed like a technical meeting. Like, I don’t want to suggest that the technical aspects are unimportant for us. But the question remains: why was so much time spent in sessions that seemed far removed from the immediate task at hand?
Michael Rogers: When the lawyers talked, the room got very quiet. It was an intrusion of the outside world. It had turned into a little bubble in a way. There was this isolation from the outside world that was just completely shattered by the lawyers. And it was shocking.
Alexis Pedrick: Now, a little context. We caught up with Alex Capron, who’s now in his early 80s, to find out what caused the shift. And he told us what happened behind the scenes.
Alex Capron: Dan and Maxine Singer conveyed to me in this sort of “sidebar conversation,” to use lawyer’s terminology, around dinnertime on the second day: You all are going to need to shake things up. You’re going to need to reorient people’s thinking if they’re going to take seriously the real reason that we’re here.
Alexis Pedrick: By Wednesday night, the group had just a half a day left to come to consensus.
Alex Capron: And they just thought, that isn’t going to work with the way this discussion has been going. And so I certainly saw that as my obligation in speaking that evening.
Alexis Pedrick: The rest of the lawyers’ session is bombshell after bombshell. The first one? That despite the tight circle they’d drawn, they’d actually been talking about things outside of science the whole time.
Alex Capron – Asilomar Tapes: When we undertake to define acceptable levels of risk and to prescribe procedures to reduce known and unknown hazards to tolerable levels, we are making ethical judgments. Like it or not, the issues presented cannot properly be deemed scientific only.
Alexis Pedrick: Then, that this group simply couldn’t do this work alone.
Alex Capron – Asilomar Tapes: There has been much talk about the risk-benefit ratio, but in fact this group is not competent to specify such a ratio. But the definition of a risk’s seriousness, of the magnitude of its consequences in social terms, remains a matter for social decision.
Alexis Pedrick: The lawyers quickly took the air out of the “academic freedom” argument.
Alex Capron – Asilomar Tapes: Many people have talked about this research under the banner of academic freedom. Freedom of thought does not encompass freedom to cause physical injury to others.
Alex Capron: I recall saying something about the notion that scientific freedom would protect scientists from the application of those laws, “Well, you’re interfering with my scientific freedom,” it doesn’t exist. I mean, the people are free to have the ideas that they have, but when they take actions, we regulate those actions. I saw on people’s faces some degree of bafflement about some of the things that I was saying. I was speaking a foreign language to them.
Alexis Pedrick: The lawyer shot down counter arguments from the audience.
Roger Dworkin – Asilomar Tapes: With all respect, I think that that argument is very largely beside the point.
Alexis Pedrick: There was a short lecture on OSHA.
Roger Dworkin – Asilomar Tapes: The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 is a long, horribly technical document. It would take me hours to read it to you. The general duty is to keep the work and the workplace free from hazards. Notice the statute does not say reasonably free. The statute says free.
Alexis Pedrick: They talked about tort laws and liability.
Roger Dworkin – Asilomar Tapes: Under a tort system. You and the university can both get nailed. These conventional and relatively undramatic aspects of the law may sneak up on you with very disastrous consequences, like a multi-million dollar lawsuit.
Matthew Cobb: And this allegedly sent a chill through the room and concentrated minds enormously.
Alexis Pedrick: And then there was this zinger: the lawyers reminded the scientists who would be deciding the outcome of any lawsuits they might be involved in.
Roger Dworkin – Asilomar Tapes: The tort system is administered by state and federal judges, whose only expertise is in law, with a major role retained for the jury, whose role is built in precisely because they are experts in nothing.
Michael Rogers: Perfect thing to say to a group of scientists for whom expertise was so important.
Alexis Pedrick: The fire had been lit beneath them. Alex Capron offered a small comfort: that it wasn’t too late for them to help shape their own destiny.
Alex Capron – Asilomar Tapes: The law has a tradition of allowing expert groups to regulate themselves, but we also have a history of disaster for expert groups which have not used that opportunity wisely. Any appearance of self-serving will sacrifice the natural reservoir of respect and goodwill that scientists have, and I think will bring disaster on your heads.
Alexis Pedrick: What the lawyers didn’t know was that the risk of appearing self-serving was very real.
Matthew Cobb: The meeting was sitting on a time bomb, and virtually nobody knew about it.
Alexis Pedrick: Just a few weeks before the conference. Paul Berg learned that Stanford had applied for a patent for Stan Cohen and Herb Boyer’s cloning technique.
Matthew Cobb: People in that room potentially could make vast sums of money, because every experiment would then incur a fee under the basis of the patent. So Berg was absolutely furious. You know, immediately that suggests that the meeting is self-serving. It’s there to enable these scientists to get rich. So if that had got out, if one of those journalists would have written the savage article, and then the whole thing would have collapsed, I think, and the politicians would have got involved.
Alexis Pedrick: If everyone in that room had a fire lit beneath them. Paul Berg’s fire was fueled by gasoline. His clock was ticking extra loudly.
Matthew Cobb: And the consequence of that is that overnight, the organizing committee writes these series of uh, procedures—protocols that meant that these things could be done safely, much more securely, with clear rules.
Alexis Pedrick: They drafted a document that ranked biohazard potential for experiments into four levels. Each level had a different containment facility. They also proposed the development of a crippled E.coli strain.
Matthew Cobb: And then the next morning. And this is where you get to the bizarre situation. They’ve got to be out by midday. Their contract on Asilomar, on this lovely site on the coast in California, comes to an end. Somebody else is wanting to use it at 12:01.
Chapter Five: Thursday.
Matthew Cobb: So you’ve now got the ticking clock. And if they don’t do it, then the politicians will get involved. So you’ve got politicians, lawyers, huge court cases. This is terrifying for scientists who just want to put a microbe and a virus together and see what happens, right? Now, it’s got serious.
Alexis Pedrick: And it came down to a vote.
Paul Berg – Asilomar Tapes: All those who were in favor of supporting this as a provisional statement of the proceedings of this meeting, please raise your hands.
Matthew Cobb: And virtually everything is passed with only a handful of people voting against for reasons that remain obscure.
Alexis Pedrick: But the vast majority voted yes. And they finally had a document of recommended safety guidelines. Now, that document was passed on to an advisory committee, which passed it onto the National Institutes of Health, which ultimately adopted the guidelines as conditions for funding.
Matthew Cobb: So that’s the way that regulation works in the USA—by the money. And it produces this rather strange contradiction whereby, and it still is the case for many things that you can do in the U.S. that you can do it if you’ve got private money. Whereas if you receive state funding, if you’ve got federal money, then you’ve got to follow these particular rules. So you haven’t got the feds involved in law, but the purse will only open if you agree to these conditions. Elsewhere in Europe, in the UK, France and Germany and so on, these rules were written into law.
Alexis Pedrick: By now you’re probably asking this question: was Asilomar a success? And I’ve got a really unsatisfying answer for you. It depends on who you ask. For Paul Berg, Maxine Singer, and David Baltimore, yes, it was chaotic and messy, but they got out of it what they went in hoping for. But other people thought the whole thing was overblown. Here’s Herb Boyer.
Herb Boyer: Scientists like to wear their hearts on their sleeves. They want to explain to the public that the work they were doing, you know, maybe might be a little dangerous. Of course, it was dangerous. It was nothing new in the face of the earth. So yes, science is dangerous at times. But could you overreact to that? And I think at the time, we all perhaps overreacted somewhat.
Alexis Pedrick: Cohen went a step further by saying that they lack the data to make better decisions.
Stan Cohen: I think that none of the people who signed the initial letter would have made such bold statements and recommendations about scientific aspects of our activities without more data. And here we were, coming up with suggestions and recommendations and raising concerns with notions that were coming out of thin air.
Alexis Pedrick: Some people wished Asilomar never happened. A few years after the conference, James Watson wrote an editorial called “Trying to Bury Asilomar,” and the naysayers were vindicated when we all learned that the potential dangers didn’t turn out to be so dangerous after all. That T-Rex we were all so afraid of? Maybe it wasn’t rattling its cage as loudly as we thought. And here we are, 50 years later, and there’s never been a recombinant DNA biohazard catastrophe. But hindsight is 2020.
Alex Capron: This is the same way with a pandemic, where we start off with a lot of very stringent limitations and then discover that you didn’t have to wash your groceries when you got home and wipe down everything, because that was not the way the disease was transmitted. But you start off thinking we don’t know how it’s transmitted, so you engage in extra precautions.
Alexis Pedrick: And of course, there’s still a valid critique about not addressing the big ethical issues. Berg answered this criticism decades later.
Paul Berg: This choice of agenda was due neither to oversight nor to the unawareness of the issues. It was deliberate, partly because of a lack of time at Asilomar, and partly because it was premature to consider applications that were so speculative and certainly not imminent. In 1975, the principal and more urgent concern for those that were gathered at Asilomar were the possible effects of recombinant DNA on public health and safety.
Alexis Pedrick: But even if they had addressed ethics, perhaps they wouldn’t have gotten very far with that either. This is Victor McElheny again.
Victor McElheny: Something almost impossible had been attempted during the week. A mixture of technical and scientific and political or social things were all being considered all at once by a group of people who, like all other groups of groups of people, are inadequately equipped to do all these things in the same time frame.
Matthew Cobb: What would have happened if they had talked about this stuff? Well, all the scientists would have talked crap, because scientists generally do when they, you know, they have half-formed ideas because they’re not trained in thinking in that way. You know, that’s not their job.
Alexis Pedrick: Even though they had lawyers and the journalists—outsiders at the meeting, the conference was still dominated by scientists who only knew how to do science. They drove the agenda, not the public, or, as Baltimore says, “the laymen.” Ultimately, though, the public was going to have to get involved. That happened almost immediately after the conference was over. This is Maxine Singer again.
Maxine Singer: The Asilomar conference really marked the end of the beginning of the recombinant DNA story. Up until that time, science had been the core topic and scientists the central participants, but that began to change within 24 hours of the end of the conference, and by the time a few years had passed, the discussions were a multi-ring phenomenon, sometimes even a multi-ring circus.
Alexis Pedrick: In the rest of our season, later this year, we’ll dive into the public reaction to this controversy and how some of these concerns are still with us today.
Distillations podcast is produced by the Science History Institute and recorded in the Laurie J. Landeau Digital Production Studios. Our executive producer is Mariel Carr. Our producer is Rigoberto Hernandez, and our associate producer is Sarah Kaplan. This episode was reported by Rigoberto Hernandez and Mariel Carr and mixed by Jonathan Pfeffer, who also composed the theme music.
Support for Distillations has been provided by the Middleton Foundation and the Wyncote Foundation. You can find all of our podcasts, as well as our videos and articles on our website at sciencehistory.org. And you can follow us on social media at scihistoryorg for news about our podcast and everything else going on in our free museum and library.
For Distillations, I’m Alexis Pedrick. Thanks for listening.
Rigoberto Hernandez: Is there anything we didn’t ask you that…do you want to add?
Michael Rogers: Well, one thing I learned at Asilomar was there are a lot of raccoons and in the middle of the night, the raccoons would get in fights. And it actually woke people up. And so we had a discussion about nobody knew—all of these scientists, nobody knew that raccoons could make screams like that. They were just terrifying. So we all learned something at Asilomar.
