"Asilomar Revisited: Lessons for Today?"

Those were some of the questions on the minds of 55 scientists, lawyers, historians, and ethicists who gathered here last month at the Asilomar Conference Center near Monterey to mark the 25th anniversary of that historic meeting. In February 1975, 140 participants--mostly biologists, with a handful of lawyers and physicians and 16 members of the press--gathered at the rustic conference center overlooking the Pacific to tussle with an issue that had just burst onto the biology scene: the safety …

…scientists to reflect on the impact of their work on society, said Susan Wolf, a professor of law and medicine at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. What was unique about Asilomar was that "a group of scientists was convened to reflect upon how their work affected other people's lives," said Princeton's Shapiro. And that, he and others agreed, is something that scientists owe society as they move toward whatever the next scientific revolutions might be.