Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-50
The experiment I described to you—putting antibiotic-resistance genes into a bacterium—and
making hybrid viruses of various sorts, putting virus genes willy-nilly into different places. We
had a little bit of a hierarchy of what might be really dangerous.
LIPPINCOTT: And you wanted to stop all such things.
BALTIMORE: We just asked for a voluntary moratorium in the scientific community prefatory to
having a meeting—which turned out to be the Asilomar meeting—in which the community
could consider these experiments and come up with a safe way forward. So that was the origin
of Asilomar. We did it at Asilomar because Paul said, “That’s a great place to meet.”
LIPPINCOTT: Well, what about the Cambridge City Council
BALTIMORE: That’s later. See, this issue was not publicly terribly interesting until we held the
Asilomar conference. We agreed there should be press there, but we insisted that the press agree
that they would write nothing until after the meeting was over, so that there wouldn’t be
reporting on day-to-day events, and they agreed to that and held to that. So right after the
meeting, there was a spate of publicity about the fact that the meeting had taken place, and it was
good in the sense that because we insisted that they wait until the end, they could start with the
end result, which was a call for a continued moratorium and an NIH committee to grade
experiments and a way forward on this graded experimental basis.
LIPPINCOTT: Were these scare stories, in any sense
BALTIMORE: They were a little bit scare stories. Sure. It’s sort of inevitable that they would be.
But they were pretty responsible. David Perlman at the San Francisco Chronicle. He’s still
writing stories—wonderful guy. And I can’t remember whether the New York Times had
someone there or not—maybe Harold Schmeck. I’ve forgotten who was there from the press.
LIPPINCOTT: But you think they were by-and-large responsible stories