An interview with Sydney Brenner (part 6 of 6)

Brenner works in Britain to prevent moratorium legislation based on "fallacious biological theories."

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So Paul Berg asked me to join the Asilomar Committee. So I went across to Asilomar. I don’t know whether it has been generally recognized but in fact the press were there. It (the meeting) was run by the National Academy, but the press were there in very large numbers. You have to remember that this is just after essentially the press had essentially gotten rid of a president, namely Nixon post-Watergate. They were really full of themselves. And in fact, on the first day there was a question that if someone didn’t want to be recorded by the Academy, which was making a record of the meetings, could he make his remarks off the record. And in fact that was allowed so that people who didn’t want it noted what they said at the time could do this. But the question was should the press switch off their recorders as well. And I have to say that when the vote was taken, I was the only one who voted that the press should switch off (their recorders) as well. And at the press conference, which I had to take that evening, the reporter from the Washington Post just laid hell into me. And he said, "You know this is a different country. You know, we have these things, and how dare you try to censure the press." So I said, "Look I just believe in the right of all consenting adult scientists to make fools of themselves in private." That was my remark. Anyway I got on pretty well with the man afterwards. But the interesting thing was, to me, that there was this thing that the press should make everything open. The public should participate. They want all the movements, all the science for the people.

And so this whole thing took off on that basis--that there was a moratorium, that no one knew how you would escape from the moratorium. And it is always a very bad thing to create a moratorium, without prescribing in detail under what conditions, what new knowledge, you would need in order to say, no, we don’t have one anymore. And that was why after Asilomar, I realized the number one thing would be to get rid of the moratorium. And that is why I sprang up, when I could see what was happening, and called for a vote. And it was unanimous to stop the moratorium. And then we had to go with the other things.

Well, we had conceived on this idea of biological containment, because I’d been thinking about that from the Ashby thing. In fact the whole idea--one of my notes in the Ashby thing is on biological containment--that you could make bacteria, which would render this (genetic alterations harmless). It would just be part of the tools, so to speak, of genetic engineering. That you would have microorganisms that were confined to the lab, so to speak, and even if they escaped, they would be eliminated very quickly. And of course we’d also had this big experience in England which was antibiotic use in animal feed and the rise of antibiotic resistance, and that has to tell you it’s a public health nightmare. Now everything, all pathogens, are multi-resistant to multiple antibiotics, but that wasn’t because of genetic engineering. That was because of man’s intervention by environmental means, which have all been more severe than tinkering.

So one of the thoughts that we also had to get over was that--and it’s a thought that is still around a lot–is that certain genetic configurations have not been explored in the course of evolution. And the one I used to like was the cloning of orange DNA in ducks. And you know that combination has been only explored at the phenotypic level, but not at the genotypic level. And since we don’t know what the consequences are, therefore, we could create something that we don’t know about. So of course what one has to do is to try to understand that these things are not unique, they are members of classes and in fact certain things almost like this have been explored (in nature). So, one had to say that nature is in fact the genetic engineer. Of course this is now accepted by everybody, it’s called horizontal transfer, and everybody just believes this now.

However, to go back there, there was something abnormal about moving DNA into organisms. And what happened thereafter was the NIH set up a committee to classify experiments and the conditions whereby they could be done, and there would be recombinant DNA safety committees and so on. I was on a similar commission in England, and we were very anxious not to install in any legislation, fallacious biological theories. You know one of the greatest fallacious biological theory that has been installed in legislation is that frogs don’t feel any pain because they’re cold blooded. So as you know, when the anti-vivisection laws were promulgated, only warm-blooded animals were considered. That’s neither here nor there, but it is a fallacious theory. I was very keen we shouldn’t do this, and we tried, although there was great pressure for us to be consistent with the Americans. Of course in America, it’s quite easy to change such things. In Britain, we tried not to create new laws or new regulations, but we subsumed this under some preexisting thing called the Health and Safety Executive.

But in Europe, parts of Europe, and especially in Japan, they copied the American system. And in fact they were stuck with it for 25 years because they couldn’t withdraw from it, because, of course, people correctly said, "What do you know now that you didn’t know five years ago that allows us now to change it? And you could answer that we have a different attitude, and of course, why did you put it in in the first place? Well, of it was insisted that our conditions should be very similar to those of the Americans, because the Americans were concerned about offshore genetic engineering. And if the English conditions were lower, then all Americans would come to Britain and do their experiments in UK labs, you see. So we had to have the same kind of level. But of course Americans began to change the conditions quite soon thereafter, and of course we had to have them changed in Britain. And it’s been quite a lot of one’s time doing this. But finally by writing a new scheme, which actually forced people to think quantitatively and logically and emotionally, we managed to get people to see that there was a rational basis for, say, that all it needed was good microbiological practice. And I’m happy to say that made a lot of work possible that would have just been very difficult. I consider it time well spent.

Sorry to give you this long story.

Friedberg: Very good. Sydney, thank you very much. Once again, congratulations.

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