In 1976, Harvard University wanted to build a specialized lab for recombinant DNA research. But first, it had to get permission from the city of Cambridge. The resulting city council hearings drew TV stations and captured the attention of the whole country. At the center of the controversy? A wise-talking mayor, a young outspoken molecular biologist, and an important question: in scientific research, how much say should the public have?
Credits
Host: Alexis Pedrick
Executive Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Associate Producer: Sarah Kaplan
Audio Engineer: Samia Bouzid
Music by Blue Dot Sessions
Resource List
Cobb, Matthew. As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age. New York: Basic Books, 2021.
Krimsky, Sheldon. Genetic Alchemy: A Social History of the Recombinant DNA Controversy. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984.
Rogers, Michael. “Biohazard.”
Nova: The Gene Engineers. Dailymotion.
“Cambridge DNA Hearings, 1976.” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oral History Program, oral history collection on the recombinant DNA controversy.
“Cambridge RDNA hearings, volume 1, 1976.” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oral History Program, oral history collection on the recombinant DNA controversy.
“National Academy of Sciences. Forum. Washington, DC, 1977 March 7–9.” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oral History Program, oral history collection on the recombinant DNA controversy.
“The MacNeil/Lehrer Report: Genetic Engineering.” American Archive of Public Broadcasting.
From Controversy to Cure: Inside the Cambridge Biotech Boom. MIT Video Productions.
“Pantechnicon; Dna, 1976.” WGBH.
The Andromeda Strain. IMDb.
Jurassic Park. IMDb.
CBS News – 04.06.1977
NBC News – 05.24.1977
Transcript
Alexis Pedrick: I’m Alexis Pedrick, and this is Distillations. Earlier this year, our producer Mariel Carr went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to do an interview with someone who had a story to tell.
Jonathan King: Hi, I’m Jonathan King. I’m professor emeritus of molecular biology at MIT, and we’re speaking in my office. And I have a hoarse voice because years ago I had cancer of the larynx, and radiation treatment kills the cancer, but you sound like Louis Armstrong ever after that.
Alexis Pedrick: Jonathan King has been at MIT for decades. His work was critical in the very early stages of a revolutionary scientific tool that became a huge debate.
Robert McNeil – McNeil Lehr Report, 1977: The hottest scientific controversy since man learned to split the atom is now raging over a new branch of biology called genetic engineering. This tampering with the most basic ingredients of life raises moral and ethical problems as grave as nuclear fission did.
Alexis Pedrick: It’s a story we started telling earlier this year with our episode “Science, Interrupted,” about the early breakthroughs that changed biology forever. It was an exciting time, but also a terrifying one.
ABC News, 1977: The new technique of splicing DNA from one species with DNA from another is called recombinant DNA. Some scientists think that kind of genetic meddling could create deadly new diseases.
Alexis Pedrick: Even molecular biologists themselves were worried about the potential risks. They were so worried, in fact, that they called a moratorium on their own research. Our episode “Science, Interrupted” tells that story in detail, but the short version is this: In 1975, 150 scientists gathered at a California oceanside retreat called Asilomar. They clashed with each other for four days before finally hammering out a list of proposed guidelines for how to do recombinant DNA research safely. Then they breathed a sigh of relief. They’d come up with something they could all live with, and they could get back to work. And they felt confident they’d escaped a huge fear. Federal legislation, or as some put it, “cops in the lab.” This is Michael Rogers, a reporter who covered the historic event.
Michael Rogers: It was really a sense of great relief. So, I think there was an optimism at first. And then, of course, we began to see opposition from a number of different corners.
Alexis Pedrick: Which brings us back to why Mariel went to Cambridge.
Cambridge is just across the Charles River from Boston. It’s home to two of the most elite universities in the country: Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT. MIT’s biology building, where Jonathan King’s office is, is a literal stone’s throw from Kendall Square, a neighborhood that has been called the most innovative square mile on the planet. And together with Boston, Cambridge is now the biggest biotech hub in the world, and it’s all built on genetic engineering.
Cambridge alone is home to more than 250 biotech companies. This is a city that has fully embraced biotech. But 50 years ago, this was not at all the case. In fact, it was the epicenter of the recombinant DNA controversy. In 1976, Harvard wanted to build a specialized lab to do recombinant DNA research. But despite how big and wealthy it is, Harvard is in Cambridge, and before it could build this lab, it had to get permission from the city. And that’s where the trouble started.
NOVA The Gene Engineers: Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 1976. A busy, crowded city and home of Harvard University. The city council is about to take action that will stunt the world of science. It asks Harvard not to begin a new type of research until the council has decided whether or not to ban it completely.
Alexis Pedrick: The city held public hearings, and what had been an insular argument between scientists suddenly burst into the public sphere.
Cambridge Hearings: You know, you’re going to have a public hearing. You don’t have a whole lot of people in the city of Cambridge kept hearing these reports.
Jonathan King: Before the city council hearings, this was kind of an abstract issue, right? And I’m not sure how a journalist at the time would have written about it. I don’t remember being interviewed until after the city council hearings. That’s when the cameras, you know, appeared at the Cambridge city council hearings.
Alexis Pedrick: Jonathan King was a major player in the hearings. Here he is testifying.
Jonathan King – Cambridge Hearings: I’ve been concerned with this issue for a number of years.
Alexis Pedrick: He was young then, in his early 30s. He’s dressed in a short-sleeve, button-down shirt and tie, but he also has chin-length hair and sideburns. You get the sense that he was… what did they say back then? Hip, groovy. You get my point.
Jonathan King – Cambridge Hearings: I am convinced that when the people of the community understand the unbelievably unknown nature of the dangers, tampering with millions of years of evolution, they’ll say no. The city council should not…
Alexis Pedrick: News of the Cambridge hearings spread quickly around the world. By 1979, nine cities and towns throughout the U.S. had considered limiting or banning recombinant DNA research. But of all the cities and towns that took up the fight, Cambridge was the one that commanded the most attention. While on one level it was a local issue, the Cambridge hearings also asked a universal question. How much say should people have in scientific research?
Jonathan King – Cambridge Hearings: Whether you use this pipette or that pipette, that’s a scientific issue. Whether you go ahead with the research, that is not a scientific issue, okay? That is a social policy issue. Boy, the people here pay the taxes, and they bear the risk, and they’re supposed to reap the benefits. Well, let them decide. Let them decide.
Chapter One. The Mayor Who Took on Harvard.
Alexis Pedrick: The Cambridge hearings had everything you need for big drama: high stakes, some big guy versus little guy energy, and a cast of characters with a lot of personality.
Jonathan King: Yeah, no, I absolutely remember what it was like to be in that room. It was a very interesting group of people.
Alexis Pedrick: The phrase “cast of characters” is fitting for this story because the inciting incident for the whole thing was actually a movie.
Andromeda Strain: We see bodies, lots of them. Stay at your stations. Hit that security button.
Alexis Pedrick: The Andromeda Strain is a science fiction film based on Michael Crichton’s novel of the same name.
Andromeda Strain: Did you see that?
Andromeda Strain: I saw it. You didn’t change the lighting.
Andromeda Strain: I didn’t touch it.
Alexis Pedrick: It’s about a space virus that comes to Earth from a returning satellite and threatens to wipe out humanity alive.
Andromeda Strain: Yeah.
Andromeda Strain: Good God. It’s growing.
Alexis Pedrick: The film came out in 1971, but people were still talking about it in 1976. And a member of Cambridge’s city council named Barbara Ackerman watched it the night before. She went to a meeting at Harvard, where she learned about the university’s plans to build a new lab for recombinant DNA research.
I mentioned earlier how scientists at Asilomar created safety guidelines. The core of those guidelines was that experiments were divided into different levels of risk. The riskier the experiment, the tighter the lab safety protocol. The lab Harvard was proposing was a level P3, just one rung below an ultra-secure facility that handled seriously dangerous pathogens. So, by that logic, P3 was somewhat scary.
Cue the scene in Andromeda Strain where something goes horribly wrong at the supposedly super secure government facility.
Andromeda Strain: The gaskets are decomposing. It’s Andromeda! Andromeda will spread everywhere. They’ll never be rid of it.
Alexis Pedrick: Full of Andromeda Strain angst, Barbara Ackerman brought the news of the lab to the mayor of Cambridge, Alfred Vellucci. And then he became full of angst, too. This is him.
Alfred Vellucci – NOVA, The Gene Engineers: Anything could come out. In fact, they don’t even know what’s going to eventually come out of this experimentation. It could be anything. It could be contamination, infections, something that could crawl out of the laboratory, such as a Frankenstein.
Alexis Pedrick: Al Vellucci was in his early 60s. He had silver hair, dark eyebrows and a thick Boston accent. He was the perfect person to go up against Harvard. He’d spent his whole life in Cambridge and had working-class roots, which he never forgot. This is Matthew Cobb, zoologist and author of As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age.
Matthew Cobb: He’s got a long-running beef with the university. I mean, who wouldn’t have? If you’re trying to run a town and you’ve got this damn university. It’s the same in Cambridge, UK, by the way. You have the same conflict between town and gown, as we call it.
Alexis Pedrick: Vellucci put the issue to a vote, and the city council unanimously decided to hold a public hearing on whether Harvard should be allowed to build its lab.
Alfred Vellucci – NOVA The Gene Engineers: It’s the people versus the scientific world, and it has surfaced and the people are now speaking out.
Cambridge Hearings: Let me ask you again.
Alexis Pedrick: The hearings lasted two days, going past midnight each time, and they were lively. This is how veteran science reporter Victor McElheny describes it.
Victor McElheny: It turned into a huge televised shouting match.
Cambridge Hearings: And if they want to do this experimentation, God damn it, they should pay for it.
Matthew Cobb: This turned very quickly into a jamboree. There were, you know, people were singing “This Land is My Land” from the public audience. And there were banners unfurled and, you know, it was the whole mid-seventies shebang. I mean, people had a great time, I think.
Alexis Pedrick: The banner read, “No recombination without representation.” The national media was there, capturing the whole thing on camera. And Al Vellucci was ready for prime time. He was made for TV.
Alfred Vellucci – Cambridge Hearings: For the person who speaks, refrain from using the alphabet. Most of us in this room, including myself, are laypeople. We don’t understand your alphabet. So, you will spell it out for us so that we know exactly what you’re talking about because we are here to listen.
Alexis Pedrick: This is Michael Rogers.
Michael Rogers: He was playing to an audience that truly knew very little about genetics to begin with.
Alexis Pedrick: People on both sides of the issue testified while city councilors took it all in, trying to get an answer to a deceptively simple question.
Alfred Vellucci – Cambridge Hearings: Can you make an absolute 100% certain guarantee that there is no possible risk which might arise from this experimentation? Is there zero risk of danger?
Alexis Pedrick: On the proponents’ side was molecular biologist Mark Ptashne. He was the Harvard researcher whose work was on the line, and he did his best to answer this impossible question.
Mark Ptashne – Cambridge Hearings: Let me begin by giving you a blanket statement of fact. No known dangerous organism has ever been produced by a recombinant DNA experiment.
Alexis Pedrick: Also on the proponent side was biochemist Maxine Singer, who worked for the National Institutes of Health. The NIH had adopted the Asilomar guidelines, and ironically, they’d come out the first day of the Cambridge hearing, and Maxine Singer carried them with her. Now, Singer was a key organizer of the Asilomar conference, and in that crowd, she was on the conservative side of the spectrum, urging for caution. But here she found herself on the other side.
Maxine Singer – Cambridge Hearings: I must say that I’ve been surprised recently to find myself being put among those who are not concerned. I have been concerned, and I continue to be concerned. I feel that these guidelines are a very responsible response to that concern.
Alexis Pedrick: The opposing side was a motley crew. There were students who spoke, community activists and scientists, including Jonathan King. He testified about his own experiences with biohazards in his MIT lab, working with things like salmonella, E. coli and cholera.
Jonathan King: So in one of these hearings, I said, you know, we pour salmonella down the drain without decontaminating it.
Jonathan King – Cambridge Hearings: They may be saints over there at Harvard. In our labs, people get sick.
Alexis Pedrick: King’s testimony fed Al Vellucci’s line of questioning.
Alfred Vellucci – Cambridge Hearings: Is it true that in the history of science, mistakes have been known to happen? Question: Do scientists ever exercise poor judgment? Question: Do they ever have accidents? Question.
Alexis Pedrick: Vellucci wasn’t shy about his contempt for Harvard. It was pretty clear that he enjoyed the fight. He was David, and they were Goliath; and he saw himself as protecting the regular people in his city.
Jonathan King: Many, many members of his family worked in the bio labs, in the kitchen, washing and sterilizing glassware. Some worked at Harvard. So Vellucci knew what the reality of a laboratory is: all these highfalutin things going on in the lab. And then down one floor below, all these women who were getting dirty glassware. So he had some awareness of the fact that the laboratory was not just, you know, an angelic environment, and there was pollution from it.
Alexis Pedrick: Jonathan King had a similar background to Vellucci and could see things from the same point of view.
Jonathan King: I’m not from the aristocracy. I’m from Brooklyn. I went to Yale because they thought I’d play tight end for Yale. I was smart enough to know I’m not going to make a living as a football player.
Alexis Pedrick: So he decided to make his living as a scientist, but he didn’t think he was any better than the janitors or the future recombinant DNA workers.
Jonathan King: I was sharply aware, as a few of us were, that this was going to be a production technology. It wasn’t just the research technology. It was going to become a manufacturing technology. And whenever there’s manufacturing, there’s byproducts, there’s pollution.
Alexis Pedrick: Jonathan King was an ace in Mayor Vellucci’s pocket. He was outspoken, and he agreed with Vellucci. But he was from MIT. And there were other scientists within Harvard who were also skeptical: big names like biologist Ruth Hubbard and her husband, Nobel laureate George Wald.
Alfred Vellucci – NOVA The Gene Engineers: Scientists are disagreeing with one another. Nobel Prize winners are disagreeing with Nobel Prize winners, and since they can’t, uh, agree, that leaves it up to me as a layman to decide. And since I’m going to have to decide that, I’m going to have to take the side of those that disagree.
Chapter Two. What’s on Trial? Science or Politics?
Alexis Pedrick: When the hearings got going, there was an inevitable knowledge clash between the lay city council and all the scientists testifying.
Cambridge Hearings: And this could be carried on [unintelligible]
Alexis Pedrick: Some councilors were hearing about recombinant DNA for the first time. Hell, some seemed like they were hearing about regular DNA for the first time. And it didn’t help that scientists were disagreeing with each other. Whose word were they supposed to take? You can hear the frustration when one member named David Clem questions Harvard scientist Mark Ptashne.
David Clem – Cambridge Hearings: Now, you made the statement, “There is no known dangerous organism that has ever been produced by a recombinant DNA experiment.”
(Mark Ptashne) Yes.
Now, just what the hell do you think you’re going to do if you do produce one?
Alexis Pedrick: Ptashne’s discomfort is palpable.
Mark Ptashne – Cambridge Hearings: Well, I can—Pardon?
Alfred Vellucci – Cambridge Hearings: Don’t put it in the sewer.
Alexis Pedrick: That was Mayor Vellucci yelling out, “Don’t put it in the sewer.” I told you: made for TV. He even got Mark Ptashne to laugh. But that was just a quick break from some otherwise tough questioning.
Mark Ptashne – Cambridge Hearings: As near as we can tell, the probability that event will occur is extraordinarily low. Now, I know that you don’t like to hear scientists telling you that there are certain risks involved, but that they are extraordinarily low. I can only tell you, indicate to you, that what is meant by that is that the risks are less than the typical kind of risks you engage in every day in walking across the street and living with—You can disagree with the statement, but this is the point I’m making.
David Clem – Cambridge Hearings: You haven’t answered my question.
Alexis Pedrick: Just some quick background. Many, if not most, of the fears about biohazards and lab leaks came down to the vector that was being used in the experiments: E. coli. Now E. coli is a biology staple. It also happens to live in all of our guts. So a logical concern was that if a recombinant DNA organism made with E. coli got out, it could infect a human or two or way more. But the city council and the mayor were E. coli newbies. Before they could make sense of its role as a vector, they had to wrap their minds around it, period. This is Mayor Vellucci.
Alfred Vellucci – Cambridge Hearings: Do I have E. coli inside my body right now? Does everyone in this room have E. coli inside their bodies right now?
Alexis Pedrick: A councilor named Saundra Graham brought what I describe as some “I’m not supposed to be in this class” energy.
Saundra Graham – Cambridge Hearings: Can someone tell me what are the benefits we expect to get out of DNA?
Alexis Pedrick: Imagine being a civil servant, working on run-of-the-mill municipal issues, and then suddenly finding yourself in this hearing.
Saundra Graham – Cambridge Hearings: I am still wondering why this has been dropped in our laps. There must be a great division that now the political world, us who are known to make crazy decisions, now has to settle an issue in the scientific world. There must be something terribly wrong going on because we are not scientists.
Alexis Pedrick: And though the scientists in support of the research did try as best they could to explain their work and communicate both their excitement about it and the importance of it, the divide remained. So the city council had to consider the other elements of the debate. Here’s Councilor David Clem again.
David Clem – NOVA The Gene Engineers: Well, I tried to break down the issue into two facets. I discovered very early on that I am not technically capable or able to evaluate the element of scientific risk. So I looked at the other facet, which is the process that was used in establishing guidelines to control for danger.
Alexis Pedrick: But this wasn’t just a cop-out. Examining that process was crucial.
Jonathan King – Cambridge Hearings: Councilor Graham raised this question about why was it in the political sphere? It’s in the political sphere because it’s a political issue. It’s not a scientific issue. Whether you use this pipette or that pipette, that’s a scientific issue. Whether you go ahead with the research—that is not a scientific issue, okay. That is a social policy issue. The people here pay the taxes, and they bear the risk; and they’re supposed to reap the benefits. Well, let them decide. Let them decide. I don’t remember taking part in any debate that said the United States is going to go ahead with genetic engineering research.
Alexis Pedrick: And this point came to define the entire trial: who gets to decide? Many scientists saw Asilomar as an exercise in self-regulation, something to be celebrated. They were the experts. They took it upon themselves to do what was right and come up with guidelines for how to proceed. But there was a whole other way of looking at it.
Jonathan King – Cambridge Hearings: I don’t think those guidelines were written by a group of people who represented the public in all the interests. That was a group of people who were essentially the protagonists. They were the ones doing the experiments. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that they represented the people of the law at large, the scientific community at large, the public health community, the unions, anybody.
Alexis Pedrick: The self-policing of science, which so many people had been applauding, was under attack.
Alfred Vellucci – Cambridge Hearings: Did anyone in this group bother at any time to write to the mayor and the city council to inform us that you intended to carry out these experiments in the city of Cambridge?
Alexis Pedrick: It put scientists like Maxine Singer in the hot seat. Here’s David Clem questioning her.
David Clem – Cambridge Hearings: Dr. Singer, do you believe there should be civilian control over the military?
Maxine Singer – Cambridge Hearings: That’s a very difficult question for me to answer personally because it’s something unexpected and not right on the topic.
David Clem – Cambridge Hearings: Well, you see, I think it is on the topic because I think that is, in fact, the fundamental issue here. There is an important principle in this country that the people who have a vested self-interest in certain types of activities shouldn’t be the ones who are charged with not only promulgating it, but regulating it.
Alexis Pedrick: Jonathan King used a different analogy.
Jonathan King – Cambridge Hearings: Those guidelines are like having the tobacco industry write guidelines for tobacco safety.
Alexis Pedrick: Throughout the hearing, Mayor Vellucci’s disdain only grew. And finally, at the end of two days, he proposed a two-year moratorium on all recombinant DNA work in the city of Cambridge.
Alfred Vellucci – Cambridge Hearings: Whereas there is still considerable doubt concerning the safety of experimentation dealing with recombinant DNA. Therefore, be it resolved that the Cambridge City Council insist that no experimentation involving recombinant DNA should be done within the city of Cambridge for at least two years.
Alexis Pedrick: Vellucci was suggesting throwing out years of hard work: the hard work of Harvard scientists, the hard work of everything Asilomar had achieved, the NIH guidelines that Maxine Singer carried with her. This is Victor McElheny again.
Victor McElheny: It looked quite possible that all this research would, in practice, be banned within Cambridge.
Alexis Pedrick: You can imagine the reaction. This is Mark Ptashne.
Mark Ptashne – Cambridge Hearings: Mr. Vellucci, may I say that if you pass that resolution—if you pass that resolution—virtually every experiment done by members of the biochemistry department at Harvard would have to stop. Virtually every experiment done by about half of the members of the biology department would have to stop, including experiments that no one, sir, no one has ever claimed to have the slightest danger inherent in them.
Alexis Pedrick: Luckily for Mark Ptashne, this is not what happened.
Victor McElheny: The city council met a couple of weeks later, having soaked its head in a bucket of cold water, and appointed its own committee to consider the risks.
Alexis Pedrick: This group, called the Cambridge Experimentation Review Board, was made up of seven Cambridge residents.
Matthew Cobb: There was a nun, uh, an engineer, all sorts of people, a housewife, loads and loads, from different backgrounds on that panel. And they said, I’m sure that the people at Harvard, when they heard this proposal, their hearts must have sunk. “Oh my God, we’re going to have a load of hippies or whatever, you know. Or, you know, ignorant workers who don’t understand anything. They’re going to screw us over.” I’m sure that was the reaction.
Alexis Pedrick: The committee met twice a week for more than four months. They spent more than 100 hours listening to testimonies and deliberating. One member said that the process of coming to a final decision reminded him of a trial in which a consensus is reached by jury members wearing one another out.
Cambridge Hearings: We’ve been here for seven months. The whole world is watching this city of Cambridge tonight. You got television stations from every major station in the world watching this city council. We spent hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of research and work.
Alexis Pedrick: Finally, in January 1977, the committee shared their final proposal. Drumroll, please. They did not support a research ban. In fact, they essentially agreed with the NIH guidelines.
Matthew Cobb: They said, okay, it’s not going to be too bad. We should go ahead with this. You know, they weren’t worried about stuff getting into the sewage system and all the other fantasies that people came out with. And it all turned out okay.
Alexis Pedrick: To be fair, they did propose an additional layer of requirements on top of the NIH guidelines, including monitoring the health of lab workers and the survival and escape of all recombinant organisms.
But it’s important to note that this was fundamentally different from the NIH guidelines in a key way. You see, the NIH guidelines didn’t apply to all recombinant DNA research, just NIH-funded research like Mark Ptashne’s work at Harvard.
Matthew Cobb: If you’ve got federal money, then you’ve got to follow these particular rules. The purse will only open if you agree to these conditions, and it produces this rather strange contradiction. Whereby, and it still is the case for many things that you can do in the US, that you can do if you’ve got private money.
Alexis Pedrick: But now within the city of Cambridge, whether one was funded by the NIH or private money, everyone had to abide by these rules, and this would become really significant for Cambridge down the road. Even recombinant DNA’s harshest critics, who were not thrilled with the final proposal itself, still respected the process.
Matthew Cobb: You know, it wasn’t the great and good of Harvard or the mayor’s political office maneuvering.
Alexis Pedrick: It was democratic. The people decided.
Cambridge Hearings: Every city in the United States of America and throughout the world is now discussing the DNA experimentation in the cities and towns and villages and hamlets throughout the world.
Chapter Three. Beyond Biosafety.
Alexis Pedrick: By essentially agreeing with the NIH guidelines, Cambridge City Council found themselves repeating something the scientists did at Asilomar. You see, within the cloistered walls of that conference, scientists defined the parameters of the debate, and the parameters were strictly about biohazards. But there were other issues out there, and the public still wanted to talk about them. And they had their chance on an even bigger stage just two months after the Cambridge decision at a National Academy of Sciences forum in March of 1977.
National Academy of Sciences Forum, March 1977: Then you are morally obligated to…
Alexis Pedrick: There were familiar faces from both sides, but this time there were also non-scientists on the program: clergy, experts in philosophy and ethics, a union leader. And anyone could speak during the public comment section.
Public Commenters at National Academy of Sciences Forum, March 1977: I’m Emily Sweat. I’m a housewife, trained as a public health nurse… I’m Bill Soderberg. I teach at Montgomery College… My name is Reverend Israel Christian Dudley. My ministry that I represent is known as the New Frontier of Brotherly Crusaders… I’m Elfie Avery. I’m a high school biology teacher… My name is Alfred Williams. I am an ordained Christian minister… My name is Ted Howard. I’m a co-director of the People’s Business Commission here in Washington, DC. And it seemed to me this whole gathering was missing the point…Today it’s microbes.
Alexis Pedrick: Tomorrow? Cloning people, building a superior race. A famous photograph from the forum shows two protesters holding up a foreboding banner in front of the panel of science experts that says, quote, “We will create the perfect race. Hitler, 1933.”
Ted Howard – National Academy of Sciences Forum, March 1977: And just because some scientists say that they don’t want to create a new race of “super men” as Adolf Hitler did, just because they say they don’t want to do that doesn’t mean that it’s not going to happen.
Alexis Pedrick: Ted Howard was far from the only speaker at the forum to bring up broader issues. But even though many people brought these big issues up, it was hard to get real traction on them. Nobel laureate George Wald of Harvard thought there was an understandable reason.
George Wald – National Academy of Sciences Forum, March 1977: One turns with relief, because it’s a smaller and more handleable subject to problems of safety. I regret that very much. I wish this larger question could be addressed and that indeed, scientists, and I’m a scientist, would take the lead in addressing that question.
Alexis Pedrick: Harvard biologist Ruth Hubbard was worried about meddling with nature, specifically the ramifications of combining species. Maybe, she thought, there was wisdom built into evolution.
Ruth Hubbard – National Academy of Sciences Forum, March 1977: And the very tampering and blurring is going to have unfortunate effects that we cannot foresee, and that these effects will be irreversible.
Alexis Pedrick: There was another big ethical issue brought up by a public commenter at the forum.
Public Commenters at National Academy of Sciences Forum, March 1977: One of the things people worry about is not that scientists are careless, that they’re immoral. What they worry about is that when there was a profit motive, people cut corners.
Jonathan King: Proponents of no regulation talked about freedom of research. At that time, even when they were talking publicly about freedom of research, they were filing patents, finding investors and starting companies.
Alexis Pedrick: The very early wheels of biotech were already spinning in the background. Two scientists who did the first DNA cloning experiments had filed a patent on the process itself and stood to make millions. And hardly anyone knew it. And there would be many more patents to come.
Jonathan King: I don’t know how many reporters I’ve told. Well, how come these guys ended up millionaires if there wasn’t any other self-interest other than freedom of research?
Alexis Pedrick: But George Wald was right. The big issues were still too big, too hypothetical, too in the future to address or make policy on. And even though Jonathan King thought they were important, his fight was about safety.
Jonathan King: You know, I think it’s a big enough struggle just to keep people from getting sick.
Alexis Pedrick: Cambridge had made legislation around recombinant DNA, but for the rest of the country, there were just the NIH guidelines. And the fact that they weren’t law was preposterous to people like Anthony Mazzocchi, an Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union official.
Anthony Mazzocchi – National Academy of Sciences Forum, March 1977: One can’t be serious if one talks about voluntary guidelines as being forms of containment. They’ve not worked up to date. Working people looked and laughed at any suggestion that a voluntary guideline could contain a possible contaminant.
Alexis Pedrick: People were making their views known, and the government was paying attention, and it seemed like federal legislation was inevitable. The fear that scientists had—that laws were going to halt research, damage their work, and eliminate the benefit that scientific progress was bringing to humankind, it was all coming true, or at least it seemed like it was.
Chapter Four. How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Recombinant DNA.
Alexis Pedrick: Throughout 1977, more than a dozen federal bills regulating recombinant DNA were introduced.
CBS News, 1977: The Carter administration is asking Congress to set strict federal controls on research into gene splicing, called DNA recombination.
Alexis Pedrick: Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts was a key driver. Here he is questioning the head of the NIH, Donald Fredrickson.
Senator Edward Kennedy – NOVA The Gene Engineers: If this research is being done now in industry in various parts of this country that are not complying with the NIH guidelines, I mean, could that not be an ominous situation?
Donald Fredrickson – NOVA The Gene Engineers: Well, it’s very probable, Mr. Chairman. Although I cannot tell you from certain knowledge, it’s very probable that the precautions being taken by industry, where it may be engaged in this may be every bit as stringent as the NIH.
Senator Edward Kennedy – NOVA The Gene Engineers: You don’t know that though.
Donald Fredrickson – NOVA The Gene Engineers: I don’t know that.
Alexis Pedrick: But then it all started to crumble. In September of 1977, Ted Kennedy withdrew support from his own bill. And though other pieces of legislation kept moving forward all the way until 1980, each one was weaker than the last and none ever passed.
Various Speakers – Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space: The disagreement was as to how far regulation ought to go….I am inclined to oppose the bill when it comes to the floor…. It would be better off voting no on the whole bill than to say, well, this is a boondoggle… Mr. McCormick?
(Mr. McCormick) No.
Mr. Wildler?
(Mr. Wilder) No.
Mr. Beilenson?
(Unnamed Speaker) Mr. Beilenson votes no by proxy.
Alexis Pedrick: So what happened?
A huge factor was lobbying done by scientists. The tape you just heard was from a Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space hearing, where expert witnesses gave testimony. They were the familiar voices from the debates, scientists who did the first experiments and organized Asilomar. Some of these folks testified at so many hearings and went on so many nightly news segments, it’s hard to see how they kept their day jobs.
But Jonathan King was there too, watching the outcome he’d hoped for slip away.
Jonathan King: I remember vividly at some point I blurted out that it was sacrilegious. And I remember thinking, oh my God, that is—you just undermine your whole analysis with those kind of statements.
Alexis Pedrick: Proponents, meanwhile, had new scientific data to help them. You see, as these debates chugged along, so did the science. And they got a huge leg up with a tech fix: a lab-weakened E. coli. Ever since Asilomar, scientists were trying to figure out a way to “disarm the bug,” aka make an E. coli strain that would die if it left the lab.
NOVA The Gene Engineers: The crippled strain is also super sensitive to detergent. It’s killed, too, by the bile found in the human gut. And it has one last problem should it ever find itself in the outside world: sunlight.
Alexis Pedrick: Scientists also put some of the hypothetical risky experiments to the test at Fort Detrick, a top-level P4 lab. And the results seemed reassuring.
Matthew Cobb: And I think that helped as well. So that alters the optics. Scientists become much more relaxed, and the risks now started to seem pretty minimal.
Alexis Pedrick: And all this led to a surprising outcome. Not only was there never any federal legislation, but the NIH guidelines were relaxed so much, in fact, that the Harvard lab was never built at all.
Matthew Cobb: Because by the time the whole process is finished and the plans are ready, the lab is never commissioned because the high-level security, biosecurity protocols no longer apply. So, there’s no need for this lab. And in fact, it never gets turned into a recombinant DNA lab and gets turned into offices.
Alexis Pedrick: As the risks were seeming less risky, the benefits were starting to come into focus. Scientists have been saying all along how revolutionary recombinant DNA was for research and how it would increase our basic scientific knowledge, but it was too abstract for most non-scientists. Eventually, though, the benefits became more concrete.
This is Hank Greely, the director of Stanford University’s Center for Law and the Biosciences.
Hank Greely: As biotech advanced, it became more plausible to see, hey, this can lead to drugs that will help people. That’s a powerful political argument. Offering the promise of relief from disease will get Americans to agree to many, many things.
NBC News, 1977: Scientists around the country today were paying close attention to reports from California that genetic engineering in a laboratory may be able to produce an insulin gene that could have all kinds of effects.
Alexis Pedrick: Up until this point, people with diabetes had to use insulin from animals: cows and pigs. It worked, but it wasn’t ideal.
Matthew Cobb: So, you know, on a practical level, a lot of people would have carried on getting ill because you can’t use animal insulin forever. So this was one of the issues they were able to resolve was produce something that was better. That is what this discovery enabled: the production of a life-giving drug. Imagine today without that, if we’d all got so spooked by this and said, “No, we can never do this. This must never happen.”
NBC News, 1977: Genetic engineering has become big business, and entirely new firms have emerged solely devoted to genetic engineering.
Alexis Pedrick: By 1980, the world looked very different.
Matthew Cobb: These are the Reagan years. You got to remember, everybody’s making money. Everybody’s very happy. You know, this is Wall Street. People with big glasses. Loads of cocaine. Loads of money. And within there, there is the explosion of the venture capital and startups. And one of my favorite factoids that I uncovered was that Genentech, which was the first big, hugely successful biotech startup, was incorporated in the same week and in the same part of Silicon Valley as Apple Computers.
Alexis Pedrick: Everyone from Ted Kennedy to Mayor Alfred Vellucci himself realized that biotech was a big moneymaker, and they got on board. Mayor Vellucci even cut the ribbon at Biogen’s first lab in Cambridge and said that, quote, he “likes recombinant DNA experiments, particularly when they pay taxes.” Cambridge is now a biotech hub, and one of the craziest parts of this story is that all those debates and the regulation that resulted are a big part of why.
Jonathan King: That’s why it was in Cambridge. A stable environment was established. Companies weren’t so upset about rules as long as they knew what the rules were.
Alexis Pedrick: Which means, ironically, that Jonathan King helped get biotech off the ground.
Jonathan King: I was interviewed by a journalist and he said, “How does it feel to have played such a key role in the development of the biotechnology industry?” You know, I thought, well, no one—whose going to buy that, right? But I believe it was accurate. You know, it was a contribution we actually made, that we didn’t quite appreciate because we were upset that the controls were a little too lax.
Alexis Pedrick: He even did a little consulting, which some people found surprising.
Jonathan King: I remember you asked me what I remember. I remember one time I walked into the halls. I don’t know if it was Lily or Abbott or I can’t remember which. And one of the high-up guys in the business, you know, a vice president. They recognize me from the movies. And the guy stopped me and said, “What are you doing here?” I said, “Well, you know, your production people invited me to help solve production problems.” I wasn’t trying to stop the advances of biotechnology. I just wanted it to be done safely. That was, that was quite funny.
Alexis Pedrick: In the end, a lot of people, but not everyone, learned to stop worrying and love recombinant DNA. But even Jonathan King can’t deny its benefits.
Jonathan King: Finally, with vaccine development, we see the advantages, right? Because there’s no doubt that both of the conventional vaccines and for the mRNA vaccines, the technology, the commercial technology, is very, very important.
Alexis Pedrick: But he never founded a biotech startup or became a multi-millionaire like many of his colleagues.
Mariel Carr: Did you ever think, like, maybe I’ll just give this up and join them?
Jonathan King: No. Never occurred to me. Not in a million years. No, you know, I spent that part of my life supporting public investment in science, National Institutes of Health. That’s the model for the world, right? It’s why the revolution in biotechnology happened in the United States, because taxpayers’ money was mobilized. So I always thought, “Well, man, it’s this kind of theft of the public wealth, and it still goes on.”
Alexis Pedrick: It was never a question for him. Just like speaking up at the Cambridge hearings wasn’t, even though it came at a high personal cost.
Jonathan King: My colleagues here in the biology department were not happy with those testimony. And I do remember, you know, all the times that people that otherwise I know very well, walking past me without saying hello. I mean, that went on for some years. Finally, they got used to it and that faded away. But I was always, you know, I remained the black sheep in the biology department all the 50 years I was here.
Alexis Pedrick: After the Cambridge hearings, Jonathan King kept fighting. He helped other cities with their legislation efforts. He testified in the Senate, and he fought a biowarfare lab at Boston University.
Mariel Carr: You kind of never stopped, actually. You kept doing-
Jonathan King: Just less effective, right? Right. Nobody, you know, the TV cameras stopped coming. I’m 83. And so the debate over the hazards or regulation of recombinant DNA technology, gene splicing is more than, more than 50 years ago. But I’m still here, and my brain is still working. What I was concerned about then, I remained concerned about.
Alexis Pedrick: Distillations Podcast is produced by the Science History Institute and recorded in the Laurie J. Landeau Digital Production Studios.
Our executive producer is Mariel Carr. Our producer is Rigoberto Hernandez. Our associate producer is Sarah Kaplan, and our sound designer is Samia Bouzid. This episode was recorded and produced by Mariel Carr.
Support for Distillations has been provided by the Middleton Foundation and the Wyncote Foundation. You can find all of our podcasts, as well as our videos and articles on our website at sciencehistory.org. And you can follow us on social media at @scihistoryorg for news about our podcast and everything else going on in our free museum and library.
For Distillations, I’m Alexis Pedrick. Thanks for listening.
