Asilomar Déjà Vu?

^{Photo by Wonderlane on Unsplash}

In June 1971, Robert Pollack, a young researcher at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, phoned Stanford molecular biologist Paul Berg urging him not to put genes from the tumor-inducing virus SV40 into a bacterium, E. coli, an organism that grows in the human gut.

Pollack later compared the situation to the pre-atom bomb days and the intense soul-searching induced by the atomic detonations that led many scientists in the postwar era to accept social responsibility for possible applications of their research.

For Pollack, Berg’s experiment would have been “a real disaster if one of the agents now being handled in research should in fact be a real human cancer agent” (such genetic manipulations of viruses and microorganisms later came to be termed ‘gain-of-function’). Months after Pollack’s phone call, Berg agreed to postpone the experiment, setting the stage for the historic 1975 meeting at the Asilomar conference center.

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