Today, CBAN and groups from around the world are issuing a warning about the serious consequences of scientists determining the future of biotechnology and regulating their own research. Our warning comes as hundreds of scientist-entrepreneurs gather in California to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1975 Asilomar conference. The concern underlying is that, under the false guise of open discussion, this week鈥檚 鈥淭he Spirit of Asilomar and the Future of Biotechnology鈥� conference will be used to give a green light to unfettered biotech research.
In the joint statement, groups are rejecting this closed-door event of screened participants, arguing that the meeting is geared towards those who stand to gain from biotechnology.
The outcome of the original Asilomar conference was a conclusion that scientists should guide the future of biotechnology. The conference 50 years ago was, largely, a meeting of molecular biologists, sparked by the possibility that their dangerous genetic research would trigger a demand for government regulation. The meeting was invitation-only and held behind closed doors, and it deliberately excluded broader ethical discussions and public participation. The conference reinforced the idea that scientists should be the primary arbiters of their own research boundaries and concluded that they could oversee their own research. The legacy of Asilomar is a dangerous system of self-regulation..
Today鈥檚 statement of protest calls for true democratic control over biotechnology: 鈥淲e are at a point in human history when technological developments, including genetic engineering, bioweapons, virological research, synthetic biology and other technologies, carry existential threats to health, the environment, the economy and human society. Questions about how to regulate, restrict, or prohibit, these technologies to reduce risk require broad-based, open, transparent and honest debate involving all sectors of society.鈥�
The statement warns that 鈥渆normous harms can derive from biotechnology and these can arise by many routes, both directly and indirectly and from commercial products or laboratory experiments equally鈥� and that, 鈥渋rrespective of a technology鈥檚 specifics, whoever controls it inevitably determines whether good or ill ultimately results.鈥�
The statement also says that, 鈥�biotechnologists have shown, for example through hostility to the precautionary principle, cultural unwillingness to study or learn from past mistakes
While the groups stress the need for public regulation of biotechnology, they argue that current regulation and regulatory culture is woefully inadequate to the task: 鈥渞egulation of biotechnology should ultimately be by governments acting in the best interests of society as a whole and using the precautionary principle; but this requires the regulator to have: the necessary political authority, financial independence and clearly defined responsibilities. Regulators who become cheerleaders for a technology, as commonly happens, have lost their way.鈥� for most gene-edited plants and foods provide a dangerous example that needs to be reversed.
Our statement ends with the warning that, if society does not regulate biotechnology, biotechnology is regulating society.
Let us celebrate this 50th anniversary of Asilomar by relegating it to the past where it belongs and embracing the hard task of democratic renewal that lies before us.鈥� – Prof Ben Hurlbut from the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University and co-director of the Global Observatory on Genome Editing. Read more in his article in Science magazine,