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The California meeting set standards allowing geneticists to push research to its limits without endangering public health. Organizer Paul Berg asks if another such meeting could resolve today's controversies.
Today, the benefits of genetic engineering, and the risks and ethical dilemmas that it presents, are part of everyday public discourse, thrashed out in newspaper columns and by politicians and commentators everywhere. In the early 1970s, it was a very different picture. Scientists were only just learning how to manipulate DNA from various sources into combinations that were not known to exist naturally. Although they were confident that the new technology offered considerable opportunities, the potential health and environmental risks were unclear.
The people who sounded the alarm about this new line of experimentation were not politicians, religious groups or journalists, as one might expect: they were scientists. They called for a worldwide moratorium on the work, followed by an international conference of experts at which the nature and magnitude of the risks could be assessed. At that gathering, the International Congress on Recombinant DNA Molecules, held at the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California, in February 1975, it was agreed that the research should continue but under stringent guidelines. The conference marked the beginning of an exceptional era for science and for the public discussion of science policy.
Cancer-carrying bacteria
Some of the concerns about recombinant DNA experimentation stemmed from my own work with the Simian Virus 40 (SV40), which can produce tumours in rodents. My aim was to use SV40 to introduce new genes into mammalian cells. Because the DNA of SV40 can integrate into the chromosomes of infected cells, I reasoned that any 'foreign DNA' associated with it would also become part of the infected cell's genetic make-up, and consequently we might be able to study the foreign DNA's expression in mammalian cells. To test this, we inserted a segment of DNA containing three Escherichia coli genes responsible for the metabolism of the sugar galactose into the genome of the Simian Virus.
Several scientists feared that bacteria carrying SV40 DNA might escape and cause cancer in people infected, so we chose to defer our experiments until we could be sure that the risk was nonexistent. Most researchers, like me, acknowledged that...