Legitimating Genetic Engineering

If I am to convince you that it is really in your interests for me to be self-interested, then I can only be effectively self-interested by becoming less so.

--Terry Eagleton (1991)

The new field of biotechnology was launched in the early 1970s, when the ability to perform controlled genetic engineering was first demonstrated at Stanford University by a graduate student in the department of biochemistry, Peter Lobban, and independently by the chair of the same department, Paul Berg, and his associates. Responses spanned the spectrum from optimistic predictions that genetic engineering would provide a cornucopia of marvelous new products to horror that anyone would contemplate putting tumor virus DNA into a common bacterium (a further experiment contemplated by Paul Berg). Possibilities of its application for biological warfare, human genetic engineering, and the construction of novel plants and animals were raised. Now that these possibilities are being realized, it may be useful for future struggles over genetic engineering to understand how this field originally achieved legitimacy.

The community of molecular biologists, together with the scientific establishment, responded to the emerging controversy by taking a series of decisions that produced an international scientific conference held at the Asilomar Conference Center, California, in February 1975. Whatever the state of debate about the implications of genetic engineering--and 25 years later the debate remains substantially unresolved--the Asilomar conference itself is widely seen as a seminal event, establishing the form of American policy for control of this field and serving as an influential precedent for policy making abroad.

There is a curious tension in accounts of the Asilomar conference. On one hand, the conference has been lauded as an exceptional event, in which scientists voluntarily sacrificed immediate progress in their research in order to ensure that the field would develop safely. On the other, the accounts show that many, perhaps most, of the participants resisted the questions raised about the safety of their work and simply wanted to proceed. Self-interest, not altruism, was most evident at Asilomar. Indeed, as eyewitness accounts and the conference tapes indicate, moves to address the difficult social and ethical problems posed by this field in advance of its development were firmly suppressed.

There is a disconnect here that is puzzling. I shall argue that this is best approached by understanding Asilomar as an effort on the part of the organizers to construct an ideology to support the development of a field that promised to be socially disruptive. The 1975 Asilomar Conference was, in essence, about persuading the American people and their representatives in Congress to allow the community of molecular biologists to pursue genetic engineering under a system of self-governance. Equally important, it was also about persuading the molecular biology community to accept the degree of self-sacrifice that was needed for such a strategy to be effective (Eagleton 1991).

The Politics of Asilomar

The decisions that led up to the Asilomar meeting were taken exclusively within the scientific community. Responding to the questions emerging within the elite group of scientists conversant with genetic engineering in the early 1970s, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Institute of Medicine turned to Paul Berg for advice on short- and long-term policy. Berg in turn assembled a group of leading molecular biologists and biochemists who were actually or potentially involved in the new field. Meeting at MIT in April 1974, the Berg committee produced three main recommendations: a pause for some experiments; the international conference which would be held at Asilomar; and finally, in a move whose political significance was largely missed at the time, a proposal to the director of the National Institutes of Health to establish an advisory committee to explore the hazards of the new field, to develop procedures for minimizing hazards, and to draft guidelines for research. The recommendations were published in a letter to the journal Science; all of them were acted upon (Berg et al. 1974). By the time that participants...