A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Today is the 50th anniversary of a historic scientific meeting. Half a century ago, biologists had just figured out how to take DNA from different kinds of life and mix it together. No one knew the risks of this recombinant DNA, so researchers voluntarily stopped work and gathered in California. NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reports scientists are still dealing with the same kinds of questions.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE: It was February 24, 1975, at a conference center near Asilomar State Beach in California. About 150 scientists were there, plus a few lawyers and journalists. Roy Curtiss went. He's a biologist with the University of Florida.
ROY CURTISS: Here was a situation where the scientists involved in the research were essentially evaluating their own work and its impact on society.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: He and other researchers wanted to study various genes by putting them into basic lab bacteria - something that's trivial today. But back then...
CURTISS: We didn't know what the heck would happen if you put human genes into an E.coli, for example, so there was a lot of debate on that.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: And so at the Asilomar meeting, the scientists drew up a set of safety guidelines that influenced government regulations. Those safeguards are still basically in place today, even as the world of genetic engineering has grown ever more powerful.
KATE ADAMALA: Back at the original Asilomar time, they were talking about combining properties of different organisms. And that's very different from being able to just engineer something that doesn't exist in nature from scratch.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Kate Adamala is a synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota.
ADAMALA: We're doing now the things that back 50 years ago, they would think is science fiction.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: And as technology advances, she sees some real risks. Consider a bizarre idea called mirror life. All biological molecules have a certain configuration. DNA is made from right-handed chemical building blocks, while proteins are made of left-handed ones. Recently, chemists have thought about making cells that are the exact mirror image of natural life. But Adamala and some colleagues called for a moratorium because of concerns about how mirror life could interact with, say, our immune systems.
ADAMALA: We have to be worrying about it before it becomes a reality because once it's here, then it's too late.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: That's one reason why she's joining hundreds of other scientists this week at the site of the original Asilomar meeting. They'll be discussing the potentially troubling research that's on the horizon now. John Marken is going. He's a biologist at Caltech. He says 50 years ago, scientists assumed that all of the engineered DNA they made would stay in the lab.
JOHN MARKEN: And then the products and insights that come out of that would be the things that go out into the world.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: But increasingly, researchers are envisioning engineered microbes that would be designed to live and reproduce outside. Like, imagine bacteria that could live in cement and fix cracks.
MARKEN: Maybe there needs to be a new set of biosafety-level categories specifically for things going into the environment.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: One of the organizers of this week's event is Luis Campos, a science historian at Rice University. He says as they were planning, he kept noticing echoes of 1975.
LUIS CAMPOS: The technologies might change, but the ways that we think about them or reason our way through what might happen are very familiar.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: And all the old questions - like, could we? and should we? - still apply.
Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR News.
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