Invoking Asilomar: Ethics as Tactics from the Dawn of Genetic Engineering to Synthetic Biology

Invoking Asilomar: Ethics as Tactics from the Dawn of Genetic Engineering to Synthetic Biology

Asilomar—the common name given to the renowned four-day “International Congress on Recombinant DNA Molecules” held in 1975 to assess means of minimizing the risk of potential biohazards involved with novel recombinant DNA technology—was an inflection moment for new biosafety procedures and laboratory design. It was also an indisputably important moment in the history of bioethics, although this has more often been asserted than analyzed. Although in the years since the Asilomar meeting many scientists described the event as having been primarily focused on technical issues of safety rather than social and ethical issues, careful attention to archival documentation in fact demonstrates that ethical concerns were at the forefront of the meeting, present both in the motivation for holding such a meeting, and even built into the structure of the program itself. This “lost history” of ethical concerns at Asilomar is undoubtedly an important history to recover—one that has heretofore been largely excised from common retellings of the significance of the meeting. Today, whenever emerging concerns about a new frontier of biological engineering are brought up for consideration, Asilomar is invoked as a touchstone for contemporary issues. Interlocutors debate whether Asilomar was a “good” or exemplary event; recount the history of who did what and what it meant; and question whether “another Asilomar” meeting is necessary. Memories and folk histories are deployed and interpreted by contemporary actors (and their critics) building and contesting the emergence of synthetic biology. I propose to explore the interesting resonances between the historical Asilomar as a future-directed event, and synthetic biologists’ past-directed reflections on the putative ‘lessons of Asilomar’ for contemporary biotechnology by tracking the ways in which ethical claims are deployed as tactics for larger engagement. This will serve to better inform considerations by social scientists, policymakers, and others working today to craft effective terms of engagement for the future of synthetic biology.