“Debating the ethics of human interference with the mechanics of evolution in a church at the edge of the immense saline test tube where it all started: Rarely does one find one’s metaphors so cheap — or so apt.” So began a remarkable Rolling Stone magazine article summarizing the historic International Conference on Recombinant DNA Molecules held in California in February 1975. Nearly 50 years on now, the contested meanings of this landmark event are ripe for reconsideration. In the half-century since Asilomar, scientists, scholars and policymakers alike have debated whether “Asilomar” was a paradigmatic or exemplary event; recounted how it unfolded and what it all meant for laboratory protocols, research agendas, scientific governance and for society at large; and also questioned whether “another Asilomar” meeting was necessary to deal with the emergence of newer techniques in biotechnology. In this talk, Campos will explore the resonances and tensions between the famed historical Asilomar, which saw itself as a future-directed event--especially as relates to the prospect of releasing engineered organisms into the environment--and contemporary claims for its putative lessons. As memories, folk histories and competing analyses intersect with the pressing demands, the “spirit of Asilomar” remains a contested reference point.

Asilomar as renowned for its role in developing protocols that allowed the safe use of recombinant DNA technology; it is widely claimed that this represented an example of "self-regulation" by scientists. However, the meeting was also characterised by two undiscussed issues that could have threatened the whole process. First, the submission of a patent on the Boyer-Cohen method for creating recombinant plasmids was unknown to all but a handful of delegates. Paul Berg, one of the principal organizers, only discovered this a few weeks before the conference. Had this patent been known, the existing perception in the US and Europe that a small group of researchers in California were trying to control the application of the new method would have been massively reinforced and the meeting would have been discredited as an example of self-interest, rather than self-regulation. Secondly, although the organising committee took the issue of bioweapons off the agenda, it is now known that the Soviet Union had already begun a recombinant DNA bioweapons programme, and that some of the leading Soviet geneticists present at Asilomar were aware of this. This second threat, not only to the conference, but above all to humanity, only became apparent in recent years.

This paper uses the founding of Britain’s first dedicated biotechnology company, Celltech (est. 1980), as a historical case to study the range of then-possible futures for the nascent field of genetic engineering in the UK. The company was meant to help Britain realize the kind of economic benefits from domestic research that, it was perceived, had been snatched by the USA in the cases of penicillin and monoclonal antibodies. My particular focus will be on the vision laid out for the company by Sydney Brenner, then director of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge. He had been a key figure in the Asilomar conference and other discussions about the safety of recombinant DNA in the 1970s. During the key period of Celltech’s founding, from late 1979 to the end of 1981, Brenner was playing a dizzying number of roles in the rapid development of the company, including consultant to the government agency trying to promote biotechnology, director of the laboratory whose inventions would be licensed to Celltech as its key intellectual property, and backstage organizer trying to arrange premises for the company in Cambridge. As his influence on Celltech waned with the hiring of its first director of research and the decision to base the company in the industrial town of Slough, Brenner was forced to articulate his vision of the (ideally close) relationship between academic researchers, “specialist genetic engineering firms,” and existing larger pharmaceutical and chemical companies.