Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-49
BALTIMORE: Or maybe you could guess the consequences, and they were. I mean, for instance,
putting an antibiotic-resistance gene into a pathogenic bacterium so that it would resist antibiotic
treatment. That’s an obviously disastrous thing to do, and that’s the kind of thing that became
doable. And then there were all of the fantasy things that might happen, because once you sort
of let loose— We didn’t have any real experience with what these chimeric molecules could do,
so anybody’s imagination was as good as everybody else’s imagination. And so they all began
imagining strange and disastrous scenarios—autoimmune diseases—and you just name it, it was
suggested. But I get ahead of the story. So, in ’73, the Gordon conference participants, many of
them, wrote a letter to the National Academy of Sciences saying, “This is a wonderful new
technology. It’s going to revolutionize biology. But we see a potential for danger here, and we
think that there ought to be serious consideration of how to move forward with this technology.
It shouldn’t just happen.”
LIPPINCOTT: They wanted rules
BALTIMORE: Well, if I remember correctly, it was pretty vague. Maxine Singer, one of the
organizers of the Asilomar conference, was an old friend—she’s actually a Swarthmore graduate,
although older than I am. She and Dieter Söll were the two co-chairs of that Gordon conference.
They signed the letter to the National Academy. She contacted Paul Berg, who was her good
friend—I don’t think he was at that meeting—and said, “We’ve got to do something to respond
to this.” Now, Paul and I and others had been involved in an earlier Asilomar meeting, because
there had been a similar kind of issue, around the safety of virus work; so we had held a meeting
at Asilomar to talk about the safety of, particularly, cancer viruses and work on SV40. But that
meeting was totally focused on lab-safety issues—whether you could get cancer in the lab and
things of that sort. So there was a precedent. So they got in touch with me, and I said yes, I
thought this was a real issue—I didn’t know anything about it. So I invited them and some other
people, including Jim Watson, to come to a meeting at the cancer center at MIT—
LIPPINCOTT: And this was ’74
BALTIMORE: This was in April ’74. So they all came, and we agreed that we would publish a
public letter saying, first of all, there should be a moratorium on certain kinds of experiments.