Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA

Yes, exactly.

Which is why in February of 1975, Michael ended up driving to a rustic conference center not too far outside of Monterey, California, called Asilomar, to attend the now very relevant Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA.

This was a, a room full of nerds.

It was a four-day conference, and most of the action took place in one big room, a chapel.

Asilomar used to be a Young Women's Christian Association camp, so they had one.

Which I always thought was, you know, very meaningful.

[laughs] Here we are debating the fundamentals of life in a chapel next to the ocean where life began.

That's ethos.com/money.

And scientists have been aware of this for a long time.

There was a conference years ago called the Asilomar Conference, Asilomar being a place in California, where a lot of molecular biologists got together to discuss the ethics of, uh, gene splicing and so on, and came up with a, a, a set of recommendations.

Now, that's fine, but of course the scientists are not the only ones who should decide.

The whole of society should decide, really, and that's the way it, it should be.

Let's compare this with genetic engineering.

When genetic engineering appeared, then quite soon the researchers themselves realized that this is not unproblematic and there should be guardrails safeguards, there should be a list of things, commandments, what is allowed and what is not allowed, and they actually gathered in Asilomar something like 50 and a half years ago, and they agreed on the protocols, so in genetic engineering what you should do and what you shouldn't do, right? And By and large, these rules have been partly updated and quite widely respected.

Now comes the interesting thing.

Again, this is something that I did not realize for quite a while.

Already in 2017, there actually was an Asilomar meeting on matters related to AI, 2017, where somebody already said that we have to be very careful, you know, there is the problem of possibility of evolutionary AI and so on.

And as opposed to the genetic case, the Asilomar meeting was all over the place, all over the media, right? The second Asilomar meeting, remained largely unnoticed, it had no measurable consequences, and so we are in a situation as if nothing had happened, right? And I think there are two differences here, and we should not put our heads into the sand.

So one is that there is an immense economic dimension here.

It seems to be, and that's careful, it seems to be an incredibly profitable business, at least in the long, incredibly, much more than genetic engineering ever was.

Now, the specific questions then were, would this recombinant DNA material or process create pathogens that would make people sick, give them cancer, that sort of thing? I suspect underneath that, was an uncertainty about the wisdom of beginning to manipulate dna and to anticipate all the things that have happened in terms of being able to modify genomes of of animals that was there but the specifics were in mid 70 the issue of creating a pathogen and there was this a conference organized by Paul Berg and colleagues, Dave Baltimore at MIT and a number of others, at Asilomar to debate this issue of recombinant DNA and to make recommendations as to how to move forward.

And at Asilomar Conference, I had the privilege of being able to attend.

I was a junior, junior at that conference and all the big pups were there and they were leading and the most, okay, it was a wonderful experience.

You know, it's something that I'll tell, I have told my grandchildren about and I'll tell them again.