Word: asilomar
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Although the scientists left Asilomar thinking that they had allayed public fear about their work, they had only managed to fan it. Newspapers, which had until then paid scant attention to the story of recombinant DNA, erupted with scare headlines, alarming the nation with exaggerated doomsday prophecies. Two months later, Ted Kennedy held his first hearings on the new genetics. Some scientists, joined by politicians, began questioning whether the molecular biologists should do their own policing. Said one: "This is probably the first time in history that the incendiaries formed their own fire brigade...
Despite the sniping, the NIH group by last summer managed to turn Asilomar's directive into concrete rules. The guidelines continue the ban against the potentially most dangerous experiments. They also provide two principal lines of defense against lesser hypothetical risks. They establish four levels of physical containment; these range from standard laboratory precautions (dubbed "P-l") for experiments in the lowest-risk category-say, injecting harmless bacterial genes into E. coli-to ultrasecure laboratories ("P-4") for work with animal tumor viruses or primate cells. At present, two new P-4 facilities are almost ready...
Laboratories can be designed to prevent the escape of potentially dangerous organisms. But there is always the chance that something or someone will fail-and that a few virulent bugs will slip through the safeguards to multiply in the outside world. Faced with this problem at the Asilomar conference. Geneticist Roy Curtiss III proposed an ingenious solution: Why not convert the standard genetic research organism, a strain of the E. coli bacterium, into a seriously weakened mutant variety that would quickly self-destruct if it escaped the laboratory? Curtiss volunteered to engineer the new bug, and his colleagues agreed...
...risks and benefits of recombinant DNA research first received wide public attention early last year when more than 100 scientists meeting at the Asilomar Center in California recommended a voluntary, temporary ban on such research...