SCIENTISTS OPEN TALKS ON SAFEGUARDS FOR GENE RESEARCH

PACIFIC GROVE, CALIFORNIA, 1975-02-24. — An international conference of scientists opened today at the Asilomar conference grounds to confront a difficulty of their own profession’s making: how to pursue a powerful new method of biological research while guarding against dangers which cannot yet be measured with confidence. The meeting, scheduled to continue through Thursday, concerns recombinant DNA—the joining of hereditary material from different sources. Certain experiments have already been placed under a voluntary restraint at the urging of leading investigators. The immediate question here is what precautions would permit work to proceed, and which investigations should remain deferred until their possible consequences are better understood.

About 140 participants from the United States and abroad are gathering on the Monterey Peninsula, with lawyers and members of the press joining the scientific specialists. The organising group includes Stanford University’s Paul Berg, a principal author of last year’s appeal for caution, together with David Baltimore, Sydney Brenner, Richard Roblin and Maxine Singer. Their undertaking is unusual. Scientists whose discoveries have opened an important field are meeting publicly to examine whether some uses of those discoveries ought to be restricted. This is neither a legislature nor a licensing authority, however, and any agreement will require support beyond the conference grounds.

The technical advance behind the meeting is the ability to construct new combinations of DNA, the chemical material carrying hereditary instructions, and to study their behaviour in living cells. Work reported by Stanley Cohen of Stanford and Herbert Boyer of the University of California, San Francisco, has demonstrated the practical force of these methods. Investigators can now approach questions about genes with a directness previously unavailable to them. The promise extends from understanding the organisation of heredity to investigating disease. But the same techniques may introduce unfamiliar hereditary properties into organisms whose ordinary behaviour is much better understood than that of their altered descendants.

Concern centres not upon an established outbreak attributable to this work, but upon the possibility of creating a hazard before anyone knows how to recognise it. Bacteria are indispensable instruments of laboratory research, yet some have close associations with man. Scientists must therefore consider whether newly introduced material could change an organism’s capacity to cause disease, survive outside the laboratory or pass an unwelcome characteristic onward. Particular uneasiness has attended proposed combinations involving tumour viruses and the transfer of resistance to antibiotics. These are questions about possible consequences, not proof that every new combination is dangerous. That distinction makes the conference’s task more difficult rather than less urgent.

The immediate background is an appeal published last July by a committee of scientists under Dr Berg’s chairmanship. It asked that selected experiments be postponed until the hazards had been assessed or safeguards devised. The committee urged scientists throughout the world to join in “voluntarily deferring” specified classes of work. Its stated test was whether “the potential hazards of such recombinant DNA molecules have been better evaluated” or adequate means developed to prevent their spread. The appeal did not demand an end to molecular biology. It sought a pause in particular investigations while the scientific community examined whether its customary laboratory precautions were equal to its new powers.

That appeal followed concern raised at a Gordon Research Conference in 1973 and subsequently brought before the National Academy of Sciences. Its signatories included Dr Baltimore and James Watson, men whose standing makes it difficult to dismiss the warning as opposition to modern biology. The same committee called for an international meeting to consider scientific progress and the “potential biohazards of recombinant DNA molecules.” Today’s gathering answers that call. The published words are important because they establish the position from which discussion begins: the investigators acknowledge uncertainty, but they also expect research to continue if defensible arrangements can be found. No settled international code is being announced at the opening.

Much will turn upon the meaning of containment. One line of protection lies in the laboratory itself: its equipment, working practices and arrangements for preventing biological material from escaping. Another lies in the organisms used for experiments, which might be chosen or developed so that they have little prospect of surviving away from controlled conditions. Neither approach removes the need for judgement about the proposed research. An experiment presenting little apparent danger need not necessarily demand the same precautions as one involving material associated with serious disease. The difficulty is to distinguish such cases honestly when the evidence is incomplete and the possible combinations are numerous.

The political question is who should make those judgements, and who should answer if they prove mistaken. The National Institutes of Health has already established a recombinant DNA advisory committee, bringing the matter within the machinery of federal research administration. Government support gives public authorities considerable influence over university and medical laboratory work, even where no special statute governs an experiment. The presence of lawyers here reflects questions extending beyond the competence of molecular biology: responsibility for injury, the standing of voluntary rules, and the public’s right to protection. International participation is equally necessary, since a precaution observed in one country offers limited reassurance if comparable work proceeds elsewhere without it.

For universities, research establishments and industries concerned with biological products, the practical stakes include both opportunity and expense. More exact knowledge of genes could eventually assist the production of useful substances and the investigation of inherited disorders. Those prospects remain research possibilities, not a commercial programme being launched at Asilomar. Conversely, elaborate containment may require substantial expenditure on buildings, equipment and trained staff, and could place some experiments beyond the means of smaller laboratories. The economic issue is therefore not simply whether restrictions impede discovery. It is also whether the institutions pursuing this work are prepared to provide the safeguards on which public acceptance may depend.

The delegates must now attempt to turn a general appeal for caution into advice that working laboratories can understand and authorities can examine. Their discussions may clarify which dangers are sufficiently plausible to warrant restraint, what evidence is missing, and where protective measures can make continued investigation reasonable. Agreement cannot by itself demonstrate that every permitted experiment is safe, any more than uncertainty establishes that the whole field should be abandoned. As the meeting opens, its immediate importance lies in the attempt to consider protection before an accident supplies the lesson. Whether that attempt produces workable rules, and whether scientists elsewhere will accept them, remain open questions.