In February of 1975, an esteemed group of scientists assembled at the Asilomar Conference Grounds near Monterey, California, to discuss placing limits on their own work. This weekend's read is an article in the journal Nature that tells the story of that meeting — both the public part and what was happening behind the scenes.
The scientists' work involved unlocking the secrets of DNA, the blueprint for all life as we know it. The existence of DNA in our cells was first discovered in 1869, though its role in genetic inheritance was not established until 1944, and its chemical structure, the famous "double helix," was found in 1953. So in the early 1970s, scientific efforts to understand DNA were still in their relative infancy. Researchers were in a frenzy trying to unlock DNA's secrets: how it encodes the instructions for making proteins; the ties between areas in our DNA and specific physical traits; and, ultimately, how to write and modify DNA ourselves.
To be honest, 50 years later, we've still just scratched the surface of understanding DNA. We can transcribe it, and we've learned the associations between some specific locations and certain traits, but precisely how DNA codes for vastly complex creatures such as human beings is still well beyond our full understanding. We have learned to copy and paste segments from one creature's DNA to another, but most of the time, we don't understand why it does what it does. In the early 1970s, this idea of mixing and matching DNA, a process known at the time as "recombinant DNA," was brand new. It held enormous promise, even back then, such as being able to create bacteria that will produce drugs such as insulin. But it also opened up frightening possibilities, such as the creation of new diseases — either accidentally, or intentionally as a form of biowarfare. Longer term, the notion of trying to bioengineer better humans conjured up still-fresh memories of the Nazis' "eugenics" efforts to engineer a perfect "Aryan master race." Hearing about new work in recombinant DNA, a group of scientists penned an open letter calling for a voluntary moratorium on such work, until a summit meeting could be held to hammer out some practical biosafety limits. Thus the stage was set for the Asilomar meeting.
In attendance at Asilomar were a number of scientists, mostly from the United States. Accompanying them were government agency representatives, eager to understand whether regulations should be written to control DNA-related work. Also there were some journalists and various representatives of life-sciences companies.
The meeting was a success; the scientists produced and adopted a set of biosafety protocols that were very influential and largely are still in force today. That's a good thing, because recent techniques, such as CRISPR-Cas9, make it far easier to edit DNA than it was 50 years ago. The National Institutes of Health adopted those protocols as a requirement for their funding arm, which put some teeth behind the rules. And the meeting stands as a high-profile example of a scientific community self-regulating to deal with a difficult issue.
Of course, behind most good, simple stories is a messier one, and the Asilomar meeting is no exception.
First, there was the mess within the scientific research community. The specific event that started the march to Asilomar was a technique invented by faculty at Stanford University and the University of California, San Francisco (USCF), to import DNA into bacteria; when it became public knowledge, the outcry grew. What was not known at the time was that the two universities had applied for a patent for the process, which if granted would make them — and the researchers who had invented it — very rich. But one of the organizers of the Asilomar conference, another Stanford researcher who was not involved in inventing the process, found out about the patent application, and it created a big problem for him. If word got out about it in advance of the conference, it would create the appearance that the researchers' primary reason for wanting to hold the conference would be to get some protocols — any protocols — in place so the moratorium on recombinant DNA work would be lifted and they could profit from their patent. And that would probably have scuttled the meeting. So he chose to keep his mouth shut and let the meeting attendees convene and do their work "in the dark" about the money at stake.
In 1977, two years after Asilomar, the technique was used to create bacteria that would produce insulin as well as an important human growth hormone. In 1980, the patent on the Stanford-UCSF technique was ultimately granted; over its term, it generated about $255 million in revenues for the two universities and the two primary inventors. In 1980, Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act that explicitly encouraged researchers receiving federal funding to pursue for-profit patenting and licensing of their discoveries and inventions. The Bayh-Dole Act led to an explosion in biotechnology venture capital — and, in so doing, it changed the conversation within the research community. With so much money at stake, researchers stopped discussing their work openly, for fear that a competing researcher might beat them to the punch. It's questionable whether the Asilomar meeting could be repeated today, given the huge financial stakes in the results for nearly everyone involved.
The second big issue happening behind the scenes at Asilomar relates to the creation of bioweapons. The meeting organizers realized that biowarfare was a real concern among many of the attendees, but they also saw it as likely to create alarmist overreactions, so they explicitly ruled it out as a topic of conversation for the meeting. Their pretense for doing so was an assertion that it was already covered by the 1972 United Nations Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), signed by the United States, the U.S.S.R., and 20 other nations. That said, the statement that accompanied the final Asilomar declaration did mention biowarfare, though gently and weakly with some big loopholes.
But despite the BWC, the U.S.S.R. was proposing to do secret biowarfare work anyway, using recombinant DNA techniques. The country sent three scientists to Asilomar who were well-respected internationally in their field, but who hid their association with their country's biowarfare efforts. For some decades prior to the 1970s, the government of the U.S.S.R. had been openly hostile to genetics research, and that left it woefully behind the West when the Cold War heated up. Soviet molecular biologists agreed to create bioweapons for the government in exchange for large increases in funding for their labs. They "played dumb" at Asilomar, feeding into the comfortable narrative that Soviet science was far behind the West, and no one seemed to catch on to the real reasons why the scientists were present.
Today, there are occasional calls for "another Asilomar" to tackle a tough issue, such as synthetic biology (a natural extension to recombinant DNA), nanotechnology, and, most recently, artificial intelligence. But we would be wise to keep in mind that even Asilomar wasn't what it purported to be, because it's never just a bunch of academic scientists self-regulating. There are always competing interests, perhaps most often financial ones. And there are governments with strong interests in influencing the outcomes: China and Russia; other world powers; political pariahs, such as North Korea, Afghanistan, and Iran; the United Kingdom and European Union; and, of course, the United States.
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