"Asilomar Revisited: Lessons for Today?"

Those were some of the questions on the minds of 55 scientists, lawyers, historians, and ethicists who gathered here uttermost month at the Asilomar Conference Center near Monterey to mark the 25th anniversary of that historic meeting. In February 1975, 140 participants--mostly biologists, with a handful of lawyers and physicians and 16 members of the press--gathered at the rustic conference perfume overlooking the Pacific to tussle with an issue that had good trespass onto the biology scene: the safety of recombinant desoxyribonucleic acid research. Known officially as the International Congress on Recombinant desoxyribonucleic acid Molecules provided when remembered ever since simply as Asilomar, that meeting was widely hailed as a landmark of social responsibility and self-governance by scientists. The participants in last months conference*--who included 11 of the 1975 conferees--were not retributive here to reminisce. Legal scholar Alex Capron, a participant in the 1975 meeting and now co-director of the Pacific Center for Health framing _or_ system of government and Ethics at the University of Southern calcium in Los Angeles, assembled the convention to discuss what lessons could be learned from the Asilomar outgrowth and, specifically, whether there ar situations today in which it might be appropriately applied. Asilomar occurred at a unique present moment in biology.

Researchers had just observe how to cut and splice together the DNA of disparate species and were parentage to contemplate the cornucopia of experiments this opened up. Recombinant DNA was the most ma ssive power ever handed to us, give tongue ! to California build of Technology president David Baltimore, one of the organizers of the 1975 meeting. The moment you heard you could do this, the imagination went wild. But a build of scientists at the prison term raised concerns about whether such experiments might create sedate new organisms, microscopic Frankensteins that could pluck out of the lab undiscovered on the sole of a Hush... If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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