Paul Berg

Yeah, I've been talking a lot about this idea of an Asilomar for the brain.

In the 1970s, Paul Berg, the Nobel Laureate at Stanford, proposed this workshop at Asilomar at the dawn of the genetic age.

What should we do about cloning genes and putting genes in organisms and so forth? And actually, a couple weeks ago, this group called BrainMind did hold at Asilomar, California, such a workshop.

Unfortunately, I came down with a bit of a bug, a viral bug, and couldn't go.

Obviously, they're all the medical ethics concerns that go with any medical field.

We have institutional review boards, we have government regulatory bodies.

And you could argue that because of the efforts of people like Paul Berg and others and the medical establishment as a whole, there is a lot of activity already in that space.

And it's, you know, there's always more, you know, transparency about company affiliations, all sorts of ethical levels where the medical establishment pursues excellence.

Now, Bob's freak out, it did not end there.

He was so worried about this that he decided to basically call the principal's office, to call Janet's boss, a guy named Paul Berg.

Give me the exact conversation.

Ring, ring, ring, ring.

The most hopeful story in the set.

In nineteen seventy-four, Paul Berg published an open letter in Science.

He'd created a hybrid of a tumor-causing monkey virus with bacterial DNA, then stopped his own experiment and called for a voluntary global moratorium, not because someone forced him, but because he was frightened of what he'd built.

That led to the nineteen seventy-five Asilomar Conference, one hundred eighty scientists in Pacific Grove, four days of debate.

And then another was the ability to link the DNA together by chemistry and being able to synthesize DNA and sequence DNA.

And all of this came together in the mid-70s, in 1975, where it was debated at conferences by scientists whether the experiments that were underway by Paul Berg, a wonderful scientist at Stanford who was a great leader in science, were wise.

He was thinking about trying to or planning to put bits of SB40, which is a DNA tumor virus, but it only makes tumors in animals that don't have an immune system, and to clone them and to isolate them and study them.

And people said, hmm, that might not be so good because we know this virus has pieces of DNA that do encode genes that make tumors in animals.

Why don't we talk about this? And that led to a moratorium.

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.

Yeah, but it's not.

Can you talk a little bit about the significance of Paul Berg DNA splicing and also touch on what mirror life is?

Like you, I love going to the origin story, right? You know, you always look to like, wait a minute, why is this character this way? Who was their father? And, you know, and we love that because it puts us into the story because it's just the truth about human nature.

You know, so origin story of bio is, Not biological weapons per se, because I do that in the history lessons, because of course it goes back to like, you know, probably as old as man, people poisoning one another.

And I try to make it very simple.

So people realize it's not that complex and I can understand it.

And so in this story, it's very important because it was just 19, early 1970, 71, 72, when Paul Berg, A bacteriologist, a microbiologist at Stanford University in California essentially discovered the ability to splice the genes of two separate organisms together.

And the way I describe it in the book is he created what was called a chimera.