The year was 1975, before cell phones and email became ubiquitous, and Alex Capron remembers watching scientists lining up at a payphone during breaks at a conference.
The payphone was in the main lodge of a conference center at Asilomar State Beach in California, and Capron says the scientists were mostly calling colleagues back at home to tell them about advances in genetic engineering that they'd just heard about.
"It was a meeting called because of concerns about the dangers," Capron recalls, "but the participants were mostly worked up about how exciting it will be to do the work."
Thanks to the development of new lab tools, mixing and matching DNA from different life forms had suddenly become a real possibility. But no one knew exactly what the consequences might be. For example, some researchers worried that putting new genes into lab bacteria might create novel pathogens.
That's why some of the field's top researchers had called for a moratorium on the work and brought the key players together to talk over what they wanted to do.
The Asilomar conference, as it came to be called, is now viewed as a historic, landmark moment in the history of biology.
This week, during its 50th anniversary, scientists, historians, and others are meeting in the same spot to consider its lessons for today.
"Asilomar has become legendary. It's become this mythical sort of event, and it gets invoked in all these different ways," says Luis Campos, a science historian at Rice University who is one of the organizers of the anniversary meeting.
As they discussed potentially worrisome biological research that's on the horizon now, he says, he kept hearing echoes of discussions that occurred during the original Asilomar meeting.
"The technologies might change," says Campos, "but the ways that we think about them or reason our way through what might happen are very familiar."
Something unique
Back in 1975, a few journalists and a few lawyers attended the meeting, which had about 150 attendees.
The legal experts warned the researchers that if they didn't take the lead in being careful about splicing together DNA from various sources, "there would be others who would step in," Capron says, "and they would not be as well informed or as solicitous to the scientists' enthusiasm for the field."
Eventually, participants hammered out safety protocols for laboratory work with recombinant DNA that went on to influence government regulations and still hold sway today.
"We knew it was something unique, because here was a situation where the scientists involved in the research were essentially evaluating their own work and its impact on society," says biologist Roy Curtiss of the University of Florida, who attended the conference five decades ago.
At the time, it was completely appropriate to get the experts in a room to try to address the dangers, says Michael Imperiale of the University of Michigan.
"Back then, it was a very tiny number of people who were doing this kind of work," says Imperiale. "And so you could, in a way, keep things 'under control,' for lack of a better term."
But he's come to believe that it shouldn't just be researchers who have a say in how science moves forward.
What's more, he says, the tools for altering genetic material have become easier and cheaper, and access to the technology is now widespread, making it hard to imagine that a meeting like Asilomar could happen again.
"And I think the stakes are a lot higher today," he adds.
Mirror life
The organizers of the anniversary conference have made an effort to make it as diverse as possible, and among the roughly 300 attendees are a lot of early-career researchers who were not even born in 1975.
"One of the things we're doing differently in 2025 is we purposely, you know, put in motion a cohort of younger people coming to the summit," says Drew Endy of Stanford University, one of the meeting's organizers. "They're coming from all over the world."
One of them is Kate Adamala of the University of Minnesota, a synthetic biologist who recently was part of a group that called for a moratorium on so-called "mirror life."
This mind-bending form of life could theoretically be synthesized by making biological molecules with a chemical orientation that is the mirror image of the orientations that occur naturally. But this could potentially evade normal immune responses or have other unpredictable interactions with standard life forms.
"Back at the original Asilomar time, they were talking about combining properties of different organisms," says Adamala, "and that's very different from being able to just engineer something that doesn't exist in nature from scratch."
While she knows it's not possible for the meeting this week to be as comprehensive as the original Asilomar, she thinks researchers still have to get together to talk about potential risks that they can foresee.
"We're going to be talking about safeguarding technologies that barely exist right now, technologies that we know are coming but are not yet common and widespread," she says.
For example, researchers are increasingly envisioning engineered microbes that would live and reproduce in the environment, says John Marken, a researcher at Caltech. Bacteria could live in concrete, for example, where it could sense and repair cracks.
"This is something that's very counter to the conventional notions of biocontainment that were around 50 years ago," says Marken, when scientists assumed that the recombinant DNA they were making would stay safely secured inside a lab.
Copyright 2025 NPR
