- Person
- Paul Berg
- Lived
- 1926–2023
- Field
- Biochemistry
- From
- American
The story
Paul Berg, the Brooklyn-born son of Russian Jewish immigrants, created the first recombinant DNA at Stanford in 1971 and 1972. His natural next step would have been to put the new hybrid DNA, which included genes from the tumour-causing monkey virus SV40, into the common gut bacterium E. coli. Colleagues raised a frightening question: what if such a bacterium escaped the laboratory and spread cancer-causing genes? No one knew how large the risk was, and Berg decided not to do the experiment.
By 1973 Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer had developed a simpler way to splice genes, and the technique was spreading fast. As public fears grew of new plagues and environmental damage, Berg chaired a committee of the National Academy of Sciences that in 1974 published a letter asking scientists worldwide to pause certain kinds of recombinant DNA experiments voluntarily until the hazards could be assessed. It was a rare case of researchers restricting their own work before any government required it.
In February 1975 Berg and Maxine Singer of the National Institutes of Health organised and chaired the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA at Pacific Grove, California. About 150 scientists from many countries attended, along with lawyers, physicians and journalists. They agreed that the level of containment should match the estimated risk of each experiment, recommended using weakened bacteria that could not survive outside the laboratory, and ruled out the most dangerous experiments. A committee at the NIH turned the recommendations into formal guidelines in 1976, and similar bodies in other countries adopted them.
As experience showed the dangers to be smaller than feared, the rules were gradually relaxed and research flourished. Berg later said that after Asilomar, science moved forward gloriously. The meeting is still held up as a model whenever a powerful new technology, from gene editing to artificial intelligence, raises public concern.
Why it matters
The safety framework that grew out of Asilomar allowed genetic engineering to develop with public trust, and it remains a model for governing powerful new technologies.
About Paul Berg
Brooklyn-born biochemist who made the first recombinant DNA, launching genetic engineering, then paused his own work and led the Asilomar meeting that set its safety rules. Nobel Prize 1980.
More about Paul Berg
Sources
- Nobel laureate Paul Berg dies at 96 Stanford Medicine
- The Paul Berg Papers: Biographical Overview National Library of Medicine, Profiles in Science
- Paul Berg Science History Institute
- Paul Berg Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.