Исторический спор 1976 года о рекомбинантной ДНК определил будущее биотехнологий в Кембридже

The DNA dispute that shaped Kendall Square In 1976, the prospect of genetic engineering research in local laboratories set off a historic debate among scientists and concerned citizens. On June 23, 1976, Cambridge City Hall hosted a hearing that would determine the future of Boston-area biotech. The meeting room was packed with over 500 people, including concerned citizens, international reporters, and protesters handing out flyers warning “Caution: Harvard University May Be Dangerous to Your Health.” By the end of five hours of heated discussion, biology professors from both Harvard and MIT were vehemently disagreeing. The Cambridge mayor, embellishing a bit, would tell a colleague that they “began to call each other liars.” The subject of the contentious meeting was a new technology: recombinant DNA. Over the previous few years, biology researchers including Janet Mertz ’70, Paul Berg, Herbert Boyer, and Stanley Cohen had developed a method for cutting out a small piece of animal DNA and gluing it into bacterial DNA, letting scientists study the influence of individual genes—and potentially create genes with new functions. Today, DNA recombination is the source of life-saving therapeutics like synthetic human insulin and some vaccines. It’s so fundamental that at MIT, the most introductory undergraduate biology classes cover how it works and how to use it. But in the 1970s, these breakthroughs were still years away. Having seen movies like The Andromeda Strain, scientists and nonscientists alike worried that a genetically modified superbug could potentially escape the lab—say, in sewage, through the ventilation system, or on someone’s clothes—and spread uncontrollably, wreaking havoc. In 1975, over 150 of the world’s leading molecular biologists convened at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, California, to establish guidelines for safe use of rDNA, as it was called. Though their discussions were meant to be in the public interest, no nonscientists were invited. When Harvard announced plans to build a laboratory equipped for rDNA experiments, Mayor Alfred Vellucci and Councilor Barbara Ackerman became concerned about the potential dangers of developing new types of bacteria so close to residential areas. Vellucci, who famously harbored no love for Harvard, proposed the open hearing so the local community could decide whether it should be allowed. Seven months of debates followed that hearing, and the result was a set of guidelines on laboratory safety so well thought through that companies like Biogen and Genzyme chose to set up shop in Kendall Square. But Kendall Square as we know it likely would not exist if the people of Cambridge hadn’t hashed out the issues the way they did. A public issue At the June 23 open hearing, researchers from both MIT and Harvard couldn’t agree on whether recombinant DNA could be declared risk-free. “The City Council finds themselves in this conundrum: They don’t know who to believe, because there’s credentials on both sides,” explained Patrick Gabridge ’86, author of a play about the June 23 hearing, at an MIT Museum symposium marking the 50th anniversary of the DNA debate. (His play, No Recombination Without Representation, premiered at Cambridge City Hall after the symposium.) “It’s left to the citizens of Cambridge to figure out: What does this mean?” No town had ever tried to regulate a scientific technique before. Most of the City Council knew very little about DNA. Councilor Saundra Graham even remarked that something must have gone horribly wrong if politicians—people who, as she acknowledged, “are known to make crazy decisions”—were being called upon to “settle an issue in the scientific world.” But MIT biology professor Jonathan King assured the council that they were dealing with a political issue, not a scientific one. King, one of the leaders of the left-wing organization Science for the People, was worried about what would happen when companies began trying to profit from the new technology. “The moment you know that a technology is going to be privatized and commercialized, you know that public health is going to be sacrificed,” King says today. “[In commercial research] you’ve got to move quickly. You’ve got to cut costs. Safety is a cost. Not polluting is a cost. Decontaminating waste is a cost.” The problem was compounded by the fact that biology labs faced far fewer regulations than they do today. Pipetting by mouth was still the norm, and some types of chemical and biological waste—in some labs, even salmonella that hadn’t been decontaminated—were still being dumped down the drain. “They may be saints over there at Harvard,” King said at the hearing, “but in our labs, people get sick.” It didn’t help that the building where Harvard hoped to perform recombinant DNA experiments was infested with ants and cockroaches. Worried that a Frankenstein bacterium might emerge from the research, Vellucci proposed banning recombinant DNA experiments for the next two years. “We want to be damned sure the people of Cambridge won’t be affected by anything that could crawl out of that laboratory,” he told the New York Times. Horrified objections from the biologists looking to do this research—who included at least four Nobel laureates—convinced the council to instead pass a three-month moratorium while debate continued. MIT hadn’t yet begun a dedicated research program in recombinant DNA, but unlike Harvard, it did have laboratories that met Asilomar’s safety guidelines. Many biologists, including MIT professor David Baltimore, were now stuck waiting for permission to conduct such experiments. “We were the ones who were going to suffer from a moratorium,” he later recalled. By November, Baltimore, who had just won a Nobel Prize, threatened to leave Cambridge if he couldn’t begin the work. If the City Council had banned recombinant DNA completely, Baltimore might have made good on his promise instead of staying and cofounding the Whitehead Institute. Fortunately, the council had other ideas. Citizens regulating science After the June 23 hearing, City Manager James Sullivan appointed eight nonbiologist residents—including a nun, an engineer, a housewife, a nurse, and an environmental ethicist and Tufts professor—to the new Cambridge Experimentation Review Board (CERB) to figure out what was best for the people of Cambridge. After four months of meetings, the CERB recommended allowing recombinant DNA research under guidelines even more stringent than those hammered out at Asilomar. “That decision on their part to go beyond simple transparency but actually inclusion triggered a whole series of things in Cambridge which I think we have maintained at a pretty high level,” Sam Lipson, the Cambridge Public Health Department’s senior director of environmental health, said at the MIT Museum symposium. To this day, about 200 nonbiologist Cantabrigians take part in the city’s effort to make sure every biotech permit meets safety standards. On February 5, 1977, the City Council unanimously passed an ordinance that put the CERB’s recommendations into action. Councilor David Clem ’76, who sponsored the ordinance, went on to become the first real estate agent to lease to biotech companies in Kendall Square. But that didn’t end the story of the Cambridge DNA debate. Clem’s ordinance called for ongoing review of recombinant DNA experiments, though finding citizens to sit on the reviewing committee proved difficult. Worse, while revising the city’s health code in 1978, the City Council accidentally repealed the rules stipulated in the ordinance. No one noticed until Biogen relocated from Geneva to Kendall and requested that the rules be restored. “Embrace of local regulation became the norm in Massachusetts biotechnology,” Robin Scheffler, a professor in MIT’s Science, Technology, and Society program, explained at the symposium. “Ironically, whereas some of the first leftist critiques of recombinant DNA had seen local regulation as a way of ensuring democracy and corporate accountability, by the 1990s the greatest backers of local regulation were members of the biotechnology industry themselves, who thought it was far better to work in stable constraints than uncertain freedom.” Learning from ’76 With the role of recombinant DNA in biological research well established, the events of 1976 still shape the way modern scientists think about new technologies like artificial intelligence. The parallel isn’t perfect, as a panel of MIT biologists and computer scientists explained at the symposium. For one thing, the financial power of AI companies can scare experts away from demanding regulation. “There’s a perception that if you speak too loudly against the big tech companies … you’re not going to get any funding,” computer science professor Marzyeh Ghassemi, PhD ’17, observed. Ghassemi recalled a Cambridge City Council hearing in 2025, when the police department was considering investing in license plate readers from Flock Safety. The company has been known to sell clients’ data to law enforcement, and officers in Texas used Flock data to investigate a woman for driving to an out-of-state abortion. Ghassemi spoke virtually at the hearing, outlining her concerns. “No other AI faculty wanted to testify,” she recalled. “They are against it privately, but they do not want to say anything publicly.” The pace of AI research also complicates regulation. For computational biology professor Manolis Kellis, the innovation rate is exponential. “Our lab, every month, doubles the stuff that we’ve done in the previous year,” he said. Kevin Esvelt, a Media Lab professor and AI safety advocate, spoke of existential technological risk and posited that humanity’s best shot at effectively regulating AI might be to have AI itself do it. All three panelists agreed that nonscientists should help decide how new technologies like AI should be adopted; the only way to ensure its alignment with human values is to facilitate open public dialogue about what those values are. Though the 1976 recombinant DNA debate was messy and complicated, it paved the way for Kendall Square’s transformation into the biotech mecca it is today—one that has improved the lives of all Cambridge residents with the health-care discoveries and tax revenue it’s produced. Even Mayor Vellucci ultimately became a fan of recombinant DNA research once biotech companies began adding to the city’s coffers. At the end of the MIT Museum’s symposium, museum director Michael John Gorman urged attendees to learn from the past. If AI is to yield positive outcomes, Gorman argued, everyone needs to have a say in what it does and how it’s regulated. As this potentially world-changing technology develops, it’s important to remember the brave souls who stood up for their beliefs in 1976—and engaged with those they disagreed with to shape a better future. Keep Reading Most Popular A fundamental flaw leaves LLMs strikingly vulnerable to attack It makes it easy to trick them into doing things they shouldn’t, such as telling you how to sabotage an aircraft’s navigation system. Anthropic found a hidden space where Claude puzzles over concepts A new technique has let the company probe deeper than ever into the weird workings of an LLM. 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