Jennifer Doudna at TEDGlobal London. James Duncan Davidson-TED/Flickr. Some rights reserved.If you are a molecular biologist, you may remember Asilomar. It was the place chosen in 1975 by a group of elite biologists —including some future Nobel prize winners such as Paul Berg and David Baltimore — to hold a conference debating the risks of experiments with a newly developed genetic engineering technique known as recombinant DNA. Their aim was to address fears that such work could potentially create dangerous pathogens. The Asilomar conference has gained an almost mythical status among American scientists who view it as a model of scientific responsibility and self-regulation of science by scientists.
But science and technology scholars have challenged this view. They argue that the aims and outcome of the Asilomar conference confined the regulation of biotechnology within the professional boundaries of science, thereby avoiding external regulation and tougher questions about the implications of such technology for society as a whole. The conference's model of “responsible self-regulation” of science has been challenged on the grounds that it is undemocratic.
Four decades on, the Asilomar conference is being cited by US scientists debating the future applications of a controversial new tool for genome editing.
