2022 Articles

Are there any good experiments that should not be done?

Pollack, Robert; Cobb, Matthew

Over half acentury ago, one of us (RP) was faced with a quandary. In June 1971, as an instructor on a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory training course, Pollack learned of aproposed experiment in Paul Berg’s Stanford laboratory that aimed to introduce DNA from the SV40 virus, which causes cancer in hamster cells, into E. coli, which grows in the human gut. This would be the first ever such experiment, and Pollack was concerned that it might produce cancers in humans. The subsequent debate laid the ground for the 1975 Asilomar conference on recombinant DNA and the introduction of clear biosecurity measures that enable the safe use of this technology.

Together with the late Joseph Sambrook, Pollack drafted a letter to Science and Nature about the potential dangers of some recombinant DNA experiments (Box 1). The letter was never sent—the authors feared that Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Director James Watson would retaliate in response to what he might see as criticism. Nevertheless, today’s students, postdocs, and junior staff should consider how they would respond iffaced with asimilarly worrying experiment.