The first Asilomar conference of 1975 has been both celebrated and condemned. Whichever way you lean it was certainly a pivotal moment in the history of biotechnology. Californian researchers working on GM microbes and GM viruses faced pushback for the first time on the potential hazards involved and gradually came to realise that their experiments might be dangerous and needed oversight. The critical question (for them) became: who would do the oversight? The public? The government? The scientists themselves? So they met at Asilomar, California, partly to assess the dangers and partly to create a solution to their political problem. Since the meeting was invitation-only and held behind closed doors the solution was a very self-serving one. They decided, in the absence of any meaningful critical presence, that only scientists needed to oversee their research. That solution became the model for all biotechnology oversight. It has led to uncontrolled and sometimes disastrous experiments, and to global genetic contamination by commercial products.Today, in 2025, the dangers we face from synthetic biology, mirror life, RNA technology, gene editing, etc., are much greater. Starting on February 23rd, another but much bigger conference at Asilomar (Spirit of Asilomar and the future of Biotechnology, Feb 23rd-26th) will begin. It also proposes to guide biotech regulation. It too is a closed-door invitation-only event and this time too, judging by its funders, and its lead scientific organiser, the primary goal is not enhancing public safety but about hyping biotechnology. The concern underlying the Global Civil Society Statement featured below is that this new Spirit of Asilomar conference will be used, under the false guise of open discussion, to give a green light to unfettered biotech research. The intended use of this Civil Society Statement (which as of today has been signed by over 50 global NGOs), was to be read aloud to the meeting to alert attendees to the perennially-excluded perspective of Civil Society. Despite the conference’s insistent claims to be inclusive, of Civil Society participation, and, even more surprisingly, Civil Society organisation, presentation was not permitted. Quod erat demonstrandum, as they say.
The Statement:
An Open Statement from Civil Society Addressing the ‘Spirit of Asilomar and the future of Biotechnology’ conference and to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1975 Asilomar Conference.
We 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. The following statement was offered by Civil Society to The ‘Spirit of Asilomar and the future of Biotechnology’ conference (Feb. 23-26, 2025) is billing itself as such an opportunity. But we reject as a meaningful path forward a closed-door event of screened participants geared towards those who stand to gain.
The original Asilomar conference of 1975 was a meeting mostly of molecular biologists. It was sparked in part by the possibility that their novel creations would cause society to regulate biotechnology. However, the 1975 meeting was antidemocratic. Held behind closed doors, its schedule was truncated, its invitees were unrepresentative, and the organisers unaccountable. By disregarding or subverting every one of sociologist Thomas Merton’s famous scientific norms – universalism, disinterestedness, communism (1), and organised scepticism – Asilomar was not even scientific (Merton, 1942). The output of Asilomar was more questionable still. Its discussions and the ensuing collective statement focused narrowly on the low-hanging fruit of laboratory containment (Berg et al. 1975). The all-important moral, ethical, technical, commercial, legal, and other concerns raised by biotechnology were virtually ignored. Science was never pristine; but the Asilomar conference could have been a building block for democratic (i.e. inclusive and transparent) decision-making for new technologies. Instead it became a launch-pad for the capture of biological science by unaccountable groups of scientist-entrepreneurs. Asilomar’s scientific heirs opportunistically leveraged their arcane knowledge into cash for themselves and risk for the remainder of humanity. The result was royalties and riches for a few, and, to pick examples from agriculture, ruin for family farms and ubiquitous herbicide contamination for the population at large (Connolly et al., 2022; Chang et al., 2024).
As nonprofits working for farmers’ rights, food sovereignty and food justice, medical ethics, and ecological sustainability and against seed patents, we have unique first-hand experience of biotechnology. The scientific findings described below are incomplete but nevertheless they are representative of that experience. Biotechnology is inherently problematic due to its abundance of off-target effects and unexpected consequences (Wilson, 2021). Fifty years of poorly regulated or unregulated applications inflicted on non-consensual and uninformed populations has yielded very significant negative consequences for human health and the environment.
Example 1) Insect-resistant (Bt) crops:
Far from preserving the environment, many genetically modified (GM or genetically engineered) crops produce large quantities of protein toxins (typically Cry toxins) for pest resistance (Benbrook et al., 2012). These toxins are frequently directly hazardous to non-target and beneficial organisms (e.g. Hilbeck et al., 1998; Losey et al., 1999; Lang and Vojtech, 2006; Rosi-Marshall et al., 2007; Bøhn et al., 2008; Hilbeck et al., 2012a Hilbeck et al., 2012b). Newer Bt crop varieties can contain eight different Cry toxins, escalating these risks (Hilbeck and Otto, 2015). Hence the rise of biotech crop use in the US and the decline of Monarch butterflies, to name just one country and one declining species, is not a coincidence (Taylor et al., 2020). We also consider that harms from biotech crops are systematically under-represented in the peer-reviewed literature, including because biotech companies and their academic allies often manipulate experiments to gain regulatory approval, e.g. while testing Bt crops on non-target organisms (Latham et al., 2017; Hilbeck et al., 2018).
Example 2) Herbicide-tolerant (HT) GM crops:
As has long been known, chemical-intensive industrialised agriculture is extraordinarily destructive of soils and waterways and even undermines crop health (Kremer et al., 2009). Herbicide-tolerant (HT) crops are GM crop varieties that tolerate patented herbicides (such as glyphosate, glufosinate, dicamba, and 2,4-D). These GM crops have intensified this industrial paradigm of agriculture and they have greatly increased, and not decreased, herbicide use (Benbrook, 2012; Reganold and Wachter, 2016). The underlying explanations for herbicide proliferation are profit and intellectual property – since gene patents effectively confer control of agriculture, the chemical industry acquired the seed industry to better sell pesticides. From the grassroots perspective, these vendors are not ‘life-science’ companies – the more precise epithet is death-science.
Example 3) Viruses:
In 1977, H1N1 influenza swept the globe infecting billions of people. We now know that scientists of the time suppressed their inside knowledge that H1N1 had escaped from a research lab (Kendal et al., 1978; Wertheim, 2010). Subsequently, three human epidemics/pandemics: HIV, Ebola in West Africa, and COVID-19 have appeared. Because for each outbreak the case for a lab origin, through biotechnology, is much more plausible than not, the response of scientists has been to close ranks and deliberately impede origin investigations (Hooper, 1999; Jain, 2020; Latham and Husseini, 2021; Harrison and Sachs, 2022). Meanwhile, on the most tenuous of evidence, virologists have aggressively blamed each of these outbreaks on indigenous and traditional foodways. For COVID-19 this is especially remarkable since, at the same time, scientists also refuse to divulge evidence in key databases and to perform elementary experiments that could refute a market origin. Approaching 100 million deaths have so far resulted directly from these outbreaks.
Example 4) The three gene-edited babies of He Jiankui:
The risks of human genetic manipulation are to the health of the engineered individuals, via manipulation gone wrong. They are also to the human population via reproductive transmission of genetic errors, and to society in general by the introduction of the values of manufacturing quality control (“techno-eugenics”) into human self-definition.
More than that, in the case of He Jankui, there was no scientific experiment, nothing was learned, and there was no medical need (Hurlbut, 2020). Rather, treatment was simply an effort, supported by many of his peers, to create a fait accompli, a done deal that would force the genetic manipulation of children onto the world. What this episode chiefly exemplifies is that regulation of science by scientists is not a credible option and will fail.
Conclusions
The first and broadest lesson we take from these examples and other manifestations of biotechnology is that the vast majority of biotechnology is aimed at fixing problems that are man-made or fictitious. Thus the grand underlying problem of biotechnoIogy is society dodging its responsibilities. The remaining lessons are as follows:
a) Enormous harms can derive from biotechnology and these can arise by many routes, both directly and indirectly and from commercial products or laboratory experiments equally;
b) Irrespective of a technology’s specifics, whoever controls it inevitably determines whether good or ill ultimately results;
c) Public understanding of biotechnology is weak and easily manipulated but also unnecessarily compounded by CBI and lack of government-mandated transparency;
d) Hence the use and oversight of new technology, especially biotechnology, makes exceptional moral, ethical and intellectual demands. Meeting such demands requires the precautionary principle and confronting inherent uncertainties (e.g. Harremoes et al., 2002);
e) However, biotechnologists have shown, for example through hostility to the precautionary principle, cultural unwillingness to study or learn from past mistakes;
f) Regulation 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:
i) the necessary political authority,
ii) financial independence and
iii) clearly defined responsibilities. Regulators who become cheerleaders for a technology, as commonly happens, have lost their way.
Nevertheless, expert regulators are necessary because the unnacceptable alternative to society regulating biotechnology is biotechnology regulating society.
Footnotes:
1. Common ownership of scientific goods, including data, to promote collective collaboration.
References:
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Berg, P., et al., (1975). Summary statement of the Asilomar conference on recombinant DNA molecules. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 72(6), 1981-1984.
Bøhn T., et al.,. (2008) Reduced Fitness of Daphnia magna Fed a Bt-Transgenic Maize Variety. Arch. Environ. Contam. Toxicol. 55: 584-92.
Chang, V. C., et al., (2024). Urinary biomonitoring of glyphosate exposure among male farmers and nonfarmers in the Biomarkers of Exposure and Effect in Agriculture (BEEA) study. Environment International, 187, 108644.
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Harrison, N. L., & Sachs, J. D. (2022). A call for an independent inquiry into the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(21), e2202769119.
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Hilbeck, A., & Otto, M. (2015). Specificity and combinatorial effects of Bacillus thuringiensis Cry toxins in the context of GMO environmental risk assessment. Frontiers in Environmental Science, 3, 71.
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Jain, S. L. (2020). The WetNet: what the oral polio vaccine hypothesis exposes about globalized interspecies fluid bonds. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 34(4), 504-524.
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The statement has 52 NGO Signatories as of Feb 25, 10am Eastern Time. Updates are being posted here:
Alliance for Humane Biotechnology; Family Farm Defenders; World Family (UK); OGM dangers; GeneEthics Ltd; The Bioscience Resource Project; GMWatch; R.I.S.K.Consultancy; Global Justice Ecology Project; Vigilance OGM; Institute for Responsible Technology; Human Genetics Alert; Coltivatori custodi Campania; Associazione Verdi Ambiente e Società; Coordinamento zeroogm; Ka Ohana O Na Pua; Federazione Nazionale Peo Natura; MASIPAG; Philippine Misereor Partnership Inc.; A Bigger Conversation/Beyond GM; INOFO INTERCONTINENTAL NETWORK OF ORGANIC FARMER ORGANISATIONS; Foll’avoine ‘defense biodiversité, lutte contre OGM et pesticides et pour préservation des terres fertiles et esopaces naturels; GMOScience; Food Today, Food Tomorrow; UPLB; National Federation of Peasant Women; Miljøbevægelsen NOAH (FoE DK); Food in Neighborhoods; Community Coalition; IFOAM Seeds Platform; Bangladesh Krishok Federation; Organic Shizukuishi IFOAM Recognized PGS Initiative; Organic Consumers Association; VÍA REGENERATIVA Y ORGÁNICA A.C.; Regeneration International; Københavns Fødevarefællesskab; Farmworker Association of Florida; PAN Asia Pacific; Tanzania Organic Agriculture Movement; Canadian Biotechnology Action Network (CBAN); International Coalition to Stop Designer Babies; Big Horn Safety; Centro Ecologico (Brazil); Labour Resource Center (LRC); ENSSER (European Network of Scientists for Social and Environmental Responsibility); Centro Internazionale Crocevia; Permaculture Association (Britain); AGROLINK Association; The Community Supported Agriculture Network UK;GE Free New Zealand in Food and Environment; GE Free Northland in Food and Environment; Pesticide Action and Agroecology Network; Association Quinta das Águias; THE ORGANIC & NON-GMO REPORT; Hatchard Report; Pesticide and Agroecology Network (PAN); VIA CAMPESINA; Good Food Community (Philippines);
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