THE SPIRIT OF ASILOMAR

A public talk by Luis Campos, Baker College Chair for the History of Science, Technology, and Innovation at Rice University

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 article summarizing the historic International Conference on Recombinant DNA Molecules held 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 and contemporary claims for its putative lessons for biotechnology today. As memories, folk histories, and competing analyses intersect with the pressing demands, the “spirit of Asilomar” remains a contested reference point.

Campos was the lead organizer of "The Spirit of Asilomar and the Future of Biotechnology," a major international summit held at Asilomar this past February (fifty years to the date of the original meeting), where an improbable assembly of participants from around the world and including scientists and engineers, social scientists and humanists, journalists and artists, gathered to discuss five major themes facing biotechnology today: pathogens research and bioweapons; AI and biotechnology; synthetic cells; moving beyond conventional containment; and framings of biotechnology.

Luis Campos is the Baker College Chair for the History of Science, Technology, and Innovation at Rice University. He was the co-organizer of "The Spirit of Asilomar and the Future of Biotechnology," an international summit held in Pacific Grove, California, on the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark Asilomar conference on recombinant DNA. Campos has written widely on the history of biology and is the author of Radium and the Secret of Life (2015) and co-editor of Making Mutations: Objects, Practices, Contexts (2009), and Nature Remade: Engineering Life, Envisioning Worlds (2021).

Campos served as the fourth Baruch S. Blumberg/NASA Chair of Astrobiology at the Library of Congress (2016-2017), and has been in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), Columbia University (New York), Fondation Brocher (Geneva), Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart), and Ginkgo Bioworks (Boston). He is an associate editor of the Journal of the History of Biology, and recently completed six years serving as Secretary of the History of Science Society, "the world’s largest society dedicated to understanding science, technology, and medicine, and their interactions with society in their historical context.