West Coast History of Science Society Meeting

University of California, San Francisco

April 11th - April 14th, 2002
[Program]

---

Asilomar and the ongoing debates on biotechnology in Europe and in the U.S.

Monika Kurath

ETH Zürich and University of St.Gallen, Switzerland
Office for History of Science and Technology
 

Since its beginnings in the early seventies, there have been ongoing debates on risks, benefits, social, cultural and ethical impacts of various applications of biotechnology. In the U.S. the debate started with the ÑAsilomar conference" in 1975, where mainly scientists directly involved discussed possible risks of recombinant DNA and developed a self-regulation practice. This paper aims to analyze the impacts of the Asilomar conference on the ongoing debates on biotechnology, comparing the U.S. and Europe. This study is based on over fifty interviews with main stakeholders involved in the debates in Europe and in the U.S. The results show that U.S. scientists contributed with their engagement in Asilomar to increase public confidence in science and in the development of biotechnology in the U.S. In opposition to that, in nearly all European countries in the beginning of the development of biotechnology the scientific community was hardly involved in public policy work, whereas NGOís and activist groups played an important role. Beside the complex mixture of social, cultural and political preconditions, this fact might have contributed to a more fundamentally sceptical attitude of average European citizens towards biotechnology. But the fact that Asilomar conference did not focus on some important social, cultural and ethical questions surrounding biotechnology, issues that have now have become major subjects in most public debates, leads to the conclusion that the engagement of scientists in public policy work is only one important step in a wide range of various other elements within debates on the impact of new technologies.