Remember Asilomar? Reexamining Science's Ethical and Social Responsibility

We were a bunch of academics--focused, idealistic, and often naïve--trying to do good, struggling to reconcile our conflicts, our apprehensions, our scientific ambitions, our careers, our sometimes murky sense of obligation and emerge with a practical resolution: proceed, carefully. A middle ground was reached--too restrictive for some, insufficiently restrictive for others. . . . But Asilomar surely helped in many ways to launch the complex world of biotechnology we know today.

--Robert Sinsheimer

Who remembers Asilomar? A generation ago, it was a familiar name for most molecular biologists and many other scientists, as well as science journalists, politicians, and members of the public concerned about the "biohazards" posed by the then-new field of recombinant DNA research. At the time, the term "Asilomar" was shorthand for a singular moment in the annals of science: a voluntary moratorium at the frontiers of science.

In the most literal sense, "Asilomar" refers to the rustic retreat on the Monterey Peninsula where, in February 1975, 140 biologists and physicians and four lawyers gathered to examine recombinant DNA's possible technical and scientific risks and to consider how they could be controlled. Pending the resolution worked out at Asilomar, scientists around the world had curtailed their experiments. Given the normal drives of curiosity, competition, and celebrity, it took great leadership to inspire scientists to forgo their cutting-edge research, even for a few months. Thus, it is hardly surprising that several of the scientists who led the Asilomar process were later honored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science with its Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. Yet even at that time, some observers regarded Asilomar as not solely an instance of scientific responsibility but also of scientific autonomy, that is, as an attempt by scientific leaders to maintain control in the face of possible regulation. In this view, Asilomar was a peremptory strike aimed at shielding science from the public and its elected representatives. By exercising a measure of self-restraint, scientists could reassure the public that they could be trusted to take appropriate account of the public welfare in the way they carried out their research.

Since the February 1975 meeting was both a response to earlier events and a prologue to future ones, the term "Asilomar" is often used for the whole process of scientific self-control around recombinant DNA, from the events precipitating the meeting to the actions that flowed from it. It encompasses initial concerns about the safety of early gene slicing experiments expressed at the June 1973 Gordon Conference on Nucleic Acids, and published in a letter to Science that September, signed by the conference co-chairs, Maxine Singer and Dieter Söll. Those concerns prompted the National Academy of Sciences to create an ad hoc study group, chaired by Paul Berg, which in July 1974 took the extraordinary action of calling for a worldwide moratorium on certain types of experiments and caution in undertaking others. The group also recommended that an international conference be convened and an advisory committee be established at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Donald Fredrickson, the NIH director, soon appointed a group which became the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee or, as it is now commonly called, the RAC. And with support from the NIH and others, Berg and his planning committee set about arranging the international conference for the Asilomar conference center at the end of the following February. Berg and his colleagues from Stanford had met there before; indeed, several years earlier, biomedical scientists met to consider the dangers of DNA in cancer viruses. Although that meeting resulted in neither new public policies nor public attention to the issues, it is still regarded in some circles as the first "Asilomar meeting" on the risks in DNA research, so the 1975 meeting is sometimes referred to as Asilomar 2.

Although broader in focus than the earlier meeting...