The Insights of Radical Science in the CRISPR Gene-Editing Era: A History of Science for the People and the Cambridge Recombinant DNA Controversy

Abstract

In the wake of controversy over human embryonic gene-editing with CRISPR/Cas9 technology, scientists and commentators have looked repeatedly to the 1975 Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA (rDNA) as a model for adjudicating gene-editing today. STS scholars, however, have long critiqued Asilomar as a case of insular scientific self-regulation. Looking beyond Asilomar, other histories from the early biotech years offer fresh insights for those working to create a socially responsible biotechnological practice today. Some of the first scientists to approach genetic engineering with a deep understanding of power and social equity were the biologists in the radical movement Science for the People (SftP). In 1976, SftP learned that Harvard University was planning to build a high-containment facility for rDNA research on its Cambridge campus, and fostered a unique moment of democratic technoscientific governance in their community. The organization’s radical framework for understanding and regulating rDNA differed from Asilomar’s liberal approach in important ways. While their colleagues at Asilomar ignored the social consequences of rDNA, SftP biologists produced incisive analyses of genetic reductionism, the commercialization of biotechnology, and the public regulation of science—and shared their ideas widely. Along the way, they fostered intellectual connections with an early community of radical and feminist science studies scholars who were investigating emerging issues around genetic engineering. As such, SftP’s history offers a sharper understanding of how radical scientists engaged with early STS scholars, as well as profound insights for those who are pursuing an equitable gene-editing landscape in the CRISPR era.

Introduction

For the past few years, a new gene-editing technology called ‘CRISPR/Cas9’ has turned our science fictions into stunning realities.¹ Versatile, cheap, and easy to use, CRISPR has been harnessed to correct genetic defects in mice, alter the genomes of disease-carrying mosquitoes, and edit patients’ immune cells to combat cancer (Ledford, 2015a; Cyranoski, 2016; Hesman Saey, 2017). In 2018, however, the technology became the stuff of many scientists’ nightmares. That November, Chinese researcher He Jiankui announced that he had created the world’s first CRISPR gene-edited babies: twin girls named Lulu and Nana, whom he had engineered to be genetically resistant to HIV infection (Regalado, 2018).

Because gene-editing in ‘germline’ cells such as embryos, eggs, or sperm modifies the DNA in all the cells of a developing human, Lulu and Nana will pass on all of their genetic modifications to their biological children. Given these stakes, the scientific community was alarmed to learn that He’s procedure was both medically unjustified (HIV transmission is already preventable) and riddled with technical errors. Gene-editing was not fully successful in either infant, and the extent of unintentional DNA changes in both children remains unknown (Yong, 2018).²

Jiankui announced his feat at the second International Summit on Gene Editing: a meeting that, ironically, had first been organized in an effort to avoid just this kind of scandal. In 2015, biotech pioneers David Baltimore and Paul Berg rallied with CRISPR researchers to host nearly 500 scholars, reporters, and concerned citizens in Washington, D.C. to discuss embryonic gene-editing (Baltimore, 2015a). There, the organizers decided that CRISPR should only be used on ‘somatic’ human cells that are not passed from parent to child, or on germline cells that are used for research (Baltimore et al., 2015).

Baltimore and Berg described the International Summit as the successor to the famous Asilomar Conference, a meeting they had organized forty years earlier to discuss the hazards of our first gene-editing technology: recombinant DNA (Cohen et al., 1973; Berg et al., 1974; Baltimore, 2015b). Following the organizers’ lead, journalists frequently referenced Asilomar as a historical model for scientific governance in the CRISPR era (Reardon, 2015; Reuters, 2015; Specter, 2015). In fact, organizers praised the 2015 Summit as an improved version of Asilomar that was more transparent, interdisciplinary, and publicly engaged (Baltimore, 2015b).

Yet by the second Summit in 2018, the organizers’ worst-case scenario had still borne out: CRISPR babies had been created, for no clear medical purpose, in a technically questionable procedure, without regulatory oversight. After the second Summit, commentators proved wary. They cautioned that no single governance structure would control a reckless actor, or address all of the issues that CRISPR raised. One organizer stressed that only an “ecosystem” of regulatory authorities would be able to enforce clinical gene-editing (Charo, 2019, p. 2).

In this moment of uncertainty about the future of CRISPR embryonic gene-editing, it is crucial to broaden our historical understanding of how scientists responded to the challenges of genetic engineering in the past. Both in 1975 and in recent years, the press praised Asilomar as a moment when a scientific profession took responsibility for the consequences of its work. But STS scholars have long critiqued Asilomar as a case of highly insular technoscientific governance, built on the assumption that science can be apolitical and adequately self-regulated (Krimsky, 1984; Wright, 1994; Hurlbut, 2015; Jasanoff et al., 2015). Their scholarship makes clear that the Asilomar parallel constrains our ability to imagine an equitable gene-editing landscape in the CRISPR era.

Looking beyond Asilomar, what insights do other histories from the early biotech years offer for those in pursuit of what I call a ‘socially responsible biotechnological practice’? In this mode of inquiry, researchers root their work in deep understandings of power and social equity. They think carefully about how gene-editing might aid some groups while oppressing others. They are suspicious of genetic solutions to social problems. And they welcome a wide range of voices into scientific decision-making.

Some of the earliest scientists to think about their work in these ways were the biologists in the radical movement Science for the People (SftP).³ Shortly after Asilomar, SftP learned that Harvard University was planning to build a high-containment facility for rDNA research on its Cambridge campus. The organization’s radical framework for regulating rDNA profoundly differed from Asilomar’s liberal approach. While their colleagues at Asilomar prioritized self-regulation and intentionally ignored the social issues surrounding rDNA, the biologists in SftP grappled openly with rDNA’s challenges and sparked a unique moment of democratic technoscientific governance in their community. These radical biologists believed that science was a fundamentally political activity that could be directed to serve the disenfranchised and challenge the sociopolitical status quo. Above all, they felt that a wide range of stakeholders must adjudicate scientific inquiry.

Throughout the 1970s, SftP produced nuanced scholarship on genetic engineering for academic and public audiences. Their analyses of genetic reductionism, the commercialization of biotechnology, and the public regulation of science were particularly incisive. Along the way, these biologists fostered intellectual connections with an embryonic community of radical and feminist science studies scholars who were keeping a close eye on the emerging field of genetic engineering. These scholars developed important analyses of biotechnology and biomedicine that endured as STS grew into a formal discipline. As such, the history of SftP’s work in the Cambridge controversy offers a richer understanding of the radical collaborations that shaped many early STS scholars’ work.

Finally, SftP’s radical critiques remain deeply relevant for STS scholars, scientists, and policymakers who are facing CRISPR’s challenges today. Though contemporary stakeholders work in a wide range of regulatory spaces (liberal, radical, or otherwise), SftP’s sharp critiques and activist strategies continue to offer fresh insights for all who are invested in creating a socially responsible biotechnological practice in the CRISPR age.

Analytic Perspectives

Science & Technology Studies (STS) scholars such as Kelly Moore and Sigrid Schmalzer have written carefully about the tensions between liberal and radical modes of technoscientific governance during the 1970s. As the Vietnam War raged, American scientists of all stripes were scrutinizing their complicity in the government’s war effort (Moore, 2008, p. 4). Though scientists before World War II were ‘no strangers to political engagement,’ Moore writes, the unprecedented level of federal research funding in the postwar U.S. forced many researchers to think critically about ‘the extent to which science was an independent community and a force for the improvement rather than the destruction of society’ (Moore, 2008, p. 5). Molecular biologists—whose work had been deeply influenced by an influx of federal funding and wartime physicists—were not exempt from having to think about the social consequences of their research (Kay, 1996). Confronted with the development of rDNA in 1973, American biologists put forth competing approaches to regulate the technology: a liberal framework in Asilomar, and a radical one in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In the liberal mode—which arguably still dominates American science policy today—scientists believe that they form ‘a special community with a unique moral commitment and role to play in democratic society’ (Moore, 2008, p. 17). They imagine their research as rational and politically neutral, though prone to misuse by uninformed or malicious actors. They also believe that in all but the most extreme cases, professional mechanisms such as grant applications and peer-review keep scientists in check. Importantly, Moore notes that this postwar liberal tradition of technoscientific governance draws on earlier moral individualist notions that ‘scientists had failed to take personal moral responsibility for the development and use of scientific ideas and products’ (Moore, 2008, p. 6). As such, scientists who adopt a liberal approach believe that their primary social responsibility is to serve as ‘conduit[s] for factual information’ about their research in order to foster a well-informed citizenry and government that trusts scientists, values the scientific method, and makes thoughtful decisions about how to use science in society (Moore, 2008, p. 17).

During the 1960s, however, some scientists rejected this liberal model of technoscientific governance and drew upon emerging ideas from the New Left to develop a radical approach to scientific inquiry (Moore, 2008, p. 6). Liberal scientists believed that immoral researchers, corrupted governments, and misinformed publics could drive the ‘misuse’ of science, but retained faith that existing institutions could be improved from within to guard against such negative outcomes. In contrast, radical scientists believed that scientific work done under oppressive power structures—such as capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, and racism—would always produce knowledge that benefited ruling groups over oppressed peoples (Moore, 2008, p. 130–131; Schmalzer et al., 2018, p. 2). Like other radical thinkers, these scientists believed that only a ‘fundamental reorganization of power relations’ would lead to socially beneficial scientific knowledge (Moore, 2008, p. 131).

As researchers, radical scientists believed that scientific inquiry was an inherently political act that could either uphold oppressive power structures, or be redirected to serve people that scientists had historically disenfranchised. And as educators, they equipped workers with the scientific expertise they needed to better their social conditions, and coaxed young scientists to align their scientific work with liberatory agendas (Fox, 1970; Arditti and Strunk, 1972). Above all, these thinkers believed that science was a unique site of radical social change, rather than an apolitical and morally privileged realm of knowledge production. They felt that their social responsibility was to point out when scientific knowledge was serving the interests of the powerful, and—through rigorous research, sharp social critique, and activism—challenge the sociopolitical status quo.

In contrast, the scientists at Asilomar, as scholars have shown, worked squarely within a liberal framework of technoscientific governance (Krimsky, 1984; Hall, 1987; Wright, 1994; Jasanoff, 2005; Hindmarsh and Gottweis, 2006; Vettel, 2008; Smith Hughes, 2011; Comfort, 2012; Rasmussen, 2014; Hurlbut, 2015; Yi, 2015). Though some of these scholars have acknowledged the Cambridge controversy, researchers have yet to explore SftP’s role in the debate or their connections with early science studies scholars. As such, this less-known case of radical technoscientific governance can complement and complicate the Asilomar narrative. In telling this story, I take up Schmalzer’s call to pursue closer investigations of radical science activism. At the empirical level, she suggests, scholars can ‘document activist struggles to place science in the service of human needs;’ and at the theoretical level, they can highlight ‘more robust alternatives to the top-down model of “communication” that are found in dominant liberal discourses on science and society’ (Schmalzer et al., 2018, p. 7–8). A history of SftP and the Cambridge rDNA controversy offers an opportunity to do both.

Empirical Analysis

After providing an overview of the national Science for the People movement, I recount the events in Cambridge and discuss how this episode of radical science activism differed from the liberal approach at Asilomar.⁴ Because Asilomar is discussed thoroughly in past scholarship, my comparison is brief and relies primarily on secondary literature.

I then introduce the key SftP members who were involved in the Cambridge debate, and discuss these activist scientists’ intellectual connections with an early community of radical and feminist science studies scholars.

Next, I investigate some of SftP’s key academic and public scholarship on genetic engineering. Three areas of radical analysis were particularly incisive. First, these scientists recognized the dangers of genetic reductionism and resisted narrow solutions to health problems. Second, they anticipated that genetic engineering was transforming molecular biology from a basic science into an applied field, in which profit motives loomed larger than ever before. Third, they understood that scientists needed to involve the public in decisions around the emerging field of biotechnology, and paved the way for their local community to adjudicate rDNA research.

Finally, I reflect on the how these radical critiques remain deeply relevant for scientists, STS scholars, and policymakers who are pursuing a socially responsible biotechnological practice today.

The Science for the People Movement

Science for the People, founded in 1969, emerged from the New Left to become the largest radical science movement in the United States (Moore, 2008; Bridger, 2015; Schmalzer et al., 2018). Rather than placing blame for misuses of science on a corrupted government or a misinformed public, as liberal science activists might, SftP believed that such misuses were the fallout of a knowledge production system that was socially and economically inequitable at its core. ‘Scientific activity in a technological society is not, and cannot be, politically neutral or value-free,’ organization members wrote in 1972 (Zimmerman et al., 2018, p. 19). ‘What is needed now is not liberal reform,’ they continued, arguing that liberal efforts preserved scientists’ moral integrity without questioning how scientists worked within an unjust political and economic system.

The organization’s mission, as stated in their long-running magazine (more than 100 issues over twenty years), was to expose the class control of science and technology, unite scientists with other progressive groups, and fight sexism, racism, and elitism in scientific practice.⁵ Building on the ideas of Marxist scientists, philosophers, and historians from the 1930s (such Bernal, Haldane, Huxley, and Hessen), SftP ‘sought to pierce the façade of pure or disinterested inquiry’ and ‘dismantle the notion that science could operate outside of the sway of dominant power structures.’ While their predecessors supported large-scale state-planned science, SftP and other radicals during the New Left were critical of planned science and emphasized race and gender as axes of oppression (Schmalzer et al., 2018, p. 14–15). For many years, SftP led protests at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meetings (Garvey and Chard, 2018). They also supported other radical organizations working on health issues such as the Black Panthers, the Young Lords Organization, and the Health Policy Advisory Center (Botelho, 2018a). Many feminist members of SftP were associated with the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, of the influential Our Bodies, Ourselves (Botelho, 2018b). They also fostered scientific partnerships in Vietnam, China, Cuba, and Nicaragua (Schmalzer et al., 2018, p. 3).

Through the 1970s, SftP grew into a wide network of decentralized chapters in New York, Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Madison, and Boston, among other cities. Each site took on a different character, with members tackling everything from agribusiness to nuclear non-proliferation. Genetics was a special focus for the Boston chapter, which hosted a large share of the SftP’s biologists. The emergence of recombinant DNA offered new avenues of scholarship, critique, and activism for the organization.

SftP and the Cambridge Recombinant DNA Debate

The Cambridge controversy transports us back to a critical moment when the fate of recombinant DNA was uncertain. Today, rDNA is a mundane laboratory tool and the bedrock of a multi-billion dollar biotech industry (Smith Hughes, 2001). The technology, which chemically cuts and pastes DNA from one organism into another, is safely used to study gene function and produce insulin, vaccines, and other pharmaceuticals. But in the early 1970s, rDNA’s hazards were largely unknown. Biologists understood how to manage the risks of toxic chemicals and infectious pathogens, but the risks of genetic engineering were not clear (Beck, 1992). As one reporter put it in 1975: ‘There’s no information precisely because the question deals with organisms that have never before existed on the planet’ (Rogers, 1975, p. 38). You could not know what a specific recombinant organism could do until you actually created it.

In the face of this kind of uncertainty, the biologists at the Asilomar Conference reduced the problems surrounding rDNA into technical puzzles, best solved by experts. Discussions at the 1975 meeting, held at a secluded seaside resort in Pacific Grove, California, were kept strictly to matters of laboratory practice. Susan Wright notes that the overwhelming objective of the conference was to ‘reduce the scope (and thereby the daunting complexity) of hazard evaluation by seeing broader social problems as falling outside of the field of concern’ (Wright, 1994, p. 158). Indeed, organizer David Baltimore explicitly forbade the 150 scientists in attendance from discussing sociopolitical and ethical issues, such as the possibility of human gene-editing or biological warfare (Wright, 1994, p. 149). The single non-technical session at the conference focused on the legal liabilities of rDNA research (Wright, 1994, p. 153).

These measures, as Benjamin Hurlbut describes them, were ‘an expression of scientific solidarity, but also of control—of the authority of a scientific community to constitute itself, to predict possible futures, and to define responsibilities’ (Hurlbut, 2015, p. 126). Indeed, organizer Paul Berg had pleaded to his colleagues that if they could not agree on how to move forward, they would be ‘telling the government to do it for us’ (Rogers, 1979, p. 76). No matter their sense of social responsibility, the scientists at Asilomar ultimately felt that they should manage genetic engineering’s risks. At the end of the meeting, they drafted a set of lab containment protocols for rDNA experiments that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) still enforces today (Berg et al., 1975).⁶ Ultimately, Asilomar organizers defined which questions should be discussed, and which anxieties to set aside. In a classic moment of liberal technoscientific governance, these biologists set the terms of how to evaluate the consequences of their work and directed their leading government sponsor, the NIH, to provide additional regulatory oversights of their own recommendation (Jasanoff, 2005:, p. 52).

Things unfolded quite differently in Cambridge. In the months after Asilomar, Harvard’s scientists drew up blueprints for a high-containment facility for rDNA experimentation in the Biological Laboratories, a research building in the heart of Cambridge. By this time, the NIH conducted safety studies on Asilomar protocols for the highest-risk level of rDNA experiments, which involved handling organisms with known pathogenic genes. However, the NIH had not completed safety studies for the second-highest level of containment protocols, which were designed for handling bacteria with genes that were not known to be pathogenic. The Harvard facility was designed for these kinds of experiments.

Despite this relatively meager understanding of rDNA’s experimental risks, many Harvard biologists were eager to move ahead with the new facility. James Watson, Mark Ptashne, Matthew Meselson, Walter Gilbert, Tom Maniatis, and other prominent Harvard scientists echoed the Asilomar organizers, assuring that their profession had done its due diligence and promising that rDNA heralded new treatments for cancer and other diseases (Culliton, 1976, p. 301). But they also had less lofty motivations for moving ahead: having a facility for rDNA work was crucial to keeping up with their competitors (Gottlieb and Jerome, 1976, p. 36; Lubow, 1977, p. 125).

The biologists in SftP shared a broader view of experimental uncertainty than their colleagues. They argued that because the rDNA experiments that would be done at Harvard could hypothetically be harmful, a safety assessment should be done before the facility was built. What would happen if a scientist transplanted a seemingly benign gene into a bacterial strain and conferred some new kind of pathogenicity? What if one of those bacteria escaped from the facility on someone’s hair, or down the sink, or on one of the ants that famously infested the Biological Laboratories (Gottlieb and Jerome, 1976, p. 34)? The answers were not clear.

Arguments about the facility simmered within university meetings until the summer of 1976, when SftP biologist Ruth Hubbard alerted the Cambridge mayor and brought the rDNA debate out of the ivory tower and into a dramatic hearing in City Hall (Weiner, 1978) (Figure 1).

Figure 1:

Science for the People flyer advertising Cambridge City Hall court hearing.

Courtesy of the Recombinant DNA History Collection at the MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections.

There, in front of a packed chamber of onlookers, Harvard scientists on both sides of the issue found themselves fielding questions about genetic engineering from their public servants. At that hearing, the Cambridge mayor and his fellow city councilors declared a temporary moratorium on rDNA research, and directed a committee of nine local citizens to deliberate on the future of the technology in their city. Over six months and more than 100 hours of deliberation, the Cambridge Experimentation Review Board (CERB) took a crash-course in molecular biology, complete with lab visits and interviews with more than twenty scientists (The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 1977). In January 1977, the CERB presented a proposal that closely followed NIH protocols with a few additional demands: they asked that lay citizens and lab technicians be included on Harvard’s biohazard committees, and requested that an additional municipal biohazards committee be formed to monitor research in Cambridge. The CERB’s recommendations, formalized as a city ordinance, was the first piece of legislation on rDNA in the U.S. (Krimsky, 1984, p. 307–311; Lipson, 2003).⁷

The most vocal critics of the high-containment facility were initial whistleblower Ruth Hubbard, who was the first female tenured biologist at Harvard; Hubbard’s husband, Nobel Prize winning Harvard biochemist George Wald; Richard Lewontin, a leading population geneticist at Harvard; Jonathan King, a rising star in protein-folding research at MIT; and Jonathan Beckwith, a Harvard Medical School biologist. These scientists were not opposed to rDNA writ large, but argued that the facility should not be built until the Cambridge public weighed in. All of these biologists were committed members of SftP.

Science for the People and Early Science Studies

These scientists caught the attention of many early science studies scholars who were positioning biotechnology as a site of radical analysis. In 1976, for example, Donna Haraway wrote that SftP believed ‘scientific work in a system which excludes “the people” from setting research priorities is unacceptable’ (Haraway, 1975, p. 454). In 1978, Dorothy Nelkin wrote that SftP was ‘critical of the self-regulating mechanisms of science … and seek[s] basic systemic changes in the traditional organization and control of science itself’ (Nelkin, 1978, p. 34). Despite the impression that SftP left on these early scholars, however, the organization’s influence remains underemphasized in disciplinary histories of STS. Brian Martin went so far as to lament that ‘it is a frustrating quest to attempt to find a single reference to Science for the People in a scholarly analysis of science,’ despite the group’s many insightful critiques of science and its connections to his field (Martin, 1993, p. 249). It is important to note that STS was an emerging discipline in the early 1970s, with many strands of scholarship that ranged in academic and political orientation (Jasanoff et al., 1995). Genetic engineering was one arena of intellectual intervention where SftP worked in solidarity with an emerging community of radical and feminist science studies scholars who developed lasting critiques of biotechnology and scientific inquiry more broadly.

Notably, two STS scholars who wrote formative histories of the national rDNA controversy worked closely with SftP. A few months before the Cambridge debate, Susan Wright organized with SftP to raise concerns over another high-containment facility for rDNA research at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (Rensberger, 1976). As a 1977 issue of Science for the People magazine recounts: ‘The issue [in Ann Arbor] was raised by faculty member Susan Wright, with several other faculty and Ann Arbor SftP members joining in.’ Wright and her colleagues generated such ‘escalating interest on campus and within the surrounding community’ that the university arranged a public forum to discuss the facility. Though university faculty ultimately approved the facility without public input, Wright and her collaborators transformed the rDNA controversy ‘into a movement for popular control of science’ (Park and Thacher, 1977, p. 30). Years later, Wright recalled working frequently with members of SftP’s Ann Arbor chapter during the 1970s (Wright, 2017). In 1994, she published Molecular Politics, an extensive study of rDNA regulation in the U.S. and the U.K. (Wright, 1994).

Sheldon Krimsky, whose 1984 Genetic Alchemy remains one of the most thorough accounts of the national rDNA controversy and the Cambridge debate, collaborated regularly with the biologists in SftP’s Boston chapter (Krimsky, 1984). Krimsky, who was then a Tufts professor, also served on the lay committee that deliberated on the Harvard facility (Krimsky, 1984: 303–309).⁸ After the Cambridge controversy, Krimsky wrote about biotech issues in Science for the People magazine, and served as a founding member of the Council of Responsible Genetics together with SftP member Ruth Hubbard (Krimsky, 1980, 1985). In later years, Susan Wright and SftP member Jonathan King also served on the Council’s board (Council for Responsible Genetics, 2018).

Looking beyond rDNA, the biologists in SftP’s Boston chapter worked with many science studies scholars during the 1970s and 1980s around biological and biomedical issues. Feminist collaborations were particularly fruitful: SftP members Ruth Hubbard, Rita Arditti, Barbara Beckwith, Freda Salzman, and Anne Fausto Sterling put their scholarship in conversation with early feminist STS scholars such as Evelyn Fox Keller, Donna Haraway, Helen Longino, Sandra Harding, and others (Arditti et al., 1980; Fausto Sterling, 1985; Fox Keller, 1985; Hubbard, 1990; Longino, 1990; Harding, 1991). Boston SftP members and Harvard biologists Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins contributed to several science studies volumes with STS scholars Hilary and Steven Rose (Arditti et al., 1980; Rose and Rose, 1976; Lewontin et al., 1984). And though international activities are beyond of the scope of this story, British radical science activism and critical science studies similarly flourished during this period. The Roses, for example, were among the co-founders of sister organization British Society for the Social Responsibility of Science. The London-based Radical Science Journal also produced sharp analyses of genetic engineering during these decades (Yoxen, 1981; Yoxen, 1983).

Indeed, in a recent issue of Radical History Review, Simon Schaffer, David Serlin, and Jennifer Tucker note that ‘well-known critical academic scientists associated with the SftP movement … remain among the leaders of STS in the United States’ (Schaffer et al., 2017, p. 10). Through their collaborations with Wright and Krimsky during the rDNA controversy, and in their broader activism around biotech and biomedicine, SftP found common ground with early science studies scholars who shared their radical sensibilities.

SftP’s Key Analyses of Recombinant DNA

In addition to collaborating across disciplinary boundaries, SftP biologists amplified the ideas they shared with radical STS scholars through public education campaigns, mainstream news editorials, self-published booklets and pamphlets, and their long-running magazine (Figure 2). Three areas of radical analysis particularly resonate in contemporary debates about CRISPR: the dangers of genetic reductionism, the pitfalls of for-profit biology, and the importance of public involvement in adjudicating emerging biotechnologies.

Figure 2:

Cover page of Science for the People magazine (1977) featuring the Cambridge rDNA controversy: ‘Dealing with Experts: The Great DNA Debate.’

Courtesy of SftP magazine archive at http://science-for-the-people.org.

The Dangers of Genetic Reductionism

Though the biologists in SftP understood that rDNA might offer alluring precision in the lab, they anticipated that it could also propagate a limited view of cellular function, our bodies, and the way we tackle health problems. These scientists saw the controversy over the Harvard facility as an opportunity to voice their skepticism about their field’s recent reductionist turn.

This was a strikingly unpopular position for biologists to take in the 1970s. The gene was in vogue, and rDNA—which promised more precise genetic manipulation than ever before—was the most fashionable technology of all. In 1977, DNA co-discoverer James Watson called rDNA a ‘revolution,’ and told a reporter that ‘everyone who is seriously interested in the detailed structured of the gene is now using this technology’ (Lubow, 1977, p. 119). Indeed in 1967, Harvard had established a new Biochemistry and Molecular Biology department, separate from its Biology department, to pursue this new, gene-centric research (Keller and Keller, 2001, p. 235–236).

Ruth Hubbard, a Biology professor and SftP member, wrote years later that controversy over rDNA exemplified the ‘parting of the roads’ between a new, molecular biology in which gene was king and an older, more holistic biology (Keller 2002; Rheinberger and Müller-Wille, 2017). On one side of the divide were biologists who held ‘the reductionist belief that organisms are merely the living manifestation of their DNA.’ On the other were ‘people who see organisms as more than the sum of their parts [and] who distrust reductionist oversimplifications’ (Hubbard, 1990, p. 65). While scientists at that time surely held a wide range of opinions on genetic reductionism, the biologists in SftP held a particular conceptualization of nature informed by Marxist dialectical materialism. They believed in a material world that could be explained, but not reduced into discrete levels of being. Rather, they embraced that life could only be fully understood as the sum of myriad interactions between organisms and their environments (Levins and Lewontin, 1987; Hubbard, 2003; Lewontin, 2003; Levins and Lewontin, 2007; Awerbuch et al., 2018).

SftP recognized the Cambridge debate as an opportunity to articulate this alternative biological worldview. During the hearing at City Hall, Hubbard warned that we ignored the complexity of gene-cell interactions at our peril because ‘we do know that genes sometimes act differently when they are in different environments’ (Cambridge City Council Hearing, 1976, p. 119). In a 1978 essay in Nature, SftP member Jonathan King argued that bacteria acquired new biological properties more frequently than his colleagues conveyed (King, 1978, p. 4).

The pro-facility biologists, in contrast, put forward highly reductionist arguments about rDNA. Sheldon Krimsky recalled that during one CERB meeting, he asked these scientists: ‘Are you telling me that if you take this gene from this system and you put it into this new system, that it’s only going to do what it’s going to do in the old system or nothing at all?’ They responded: ‘Yes, if you take the gene from this old system and into this new biological form, it will either express the protein it did there or it won’t do anything.’ Krimsky was not convinced. ‘I kept thinking, “What about emergence? What about emergent properties?”‘ he said (Krimsky, 2012). He, like his SftP colleagues, understood that different views on gene-environment interactions shaped different assessments of risk.

SftP also anticipated, as Jonathan Beckwith put it, that ‘a focus on genetic solutions to the world’s problems distracted attention from efforts at social change’ (Beckwith, 1986, p. 126; Reardon, 2005; Bliss, 2012). SftP had been debunking genetic reductionist ideas for several years before the rDNA controversy (Bergman, 1980, p. 50). In 1973, the Boston chapter discredited the theory that ‘XYY’ males born with a second Y chromosome were prone to criminal behavior, and helped shut down an infant screening program for the disorder at Harvard Medical School (Comfort, 2012; Botelho, 2018a). In 1975, the Boston chapter rallied against Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, in which he suggested that human behaviors such as warfare, sexual exploitation, and xenophobia could be rooted in our genetic makeup (Allen et al., 1975; Wilson, 1975). During these years, the organization also opposed psychologists Arthur Jensen and Richard Herrstein, who claimed that IQ differences between people of different races and classes suggested innate differences between these groups (Science for the People, 1974; Ann Arbor SftP Editorial Collective, 1977). When debate over rDNA emerged in Cambridge, the Boston chapter seized an opportunity to hone their critiques with regard to genetic manipulation in humans.

While scare stories of Brave New Worlds abounded in the press, SftP moved beyond sensational hypothesizing and developed important analyses about how genetic engineering in humans could oppress marginalized groups. In 1969, after his lab became the first to successfully isolate a bacterial gene in vitro, Jonathan Beckwith took the unusual step of holding a press conference to discuss the social implications of his lab’s findings. ‘The more we think about it, the more we realize that [our techniques] could be used to purify genes in higher organisms,’ Beckwith warned the press. ‘The steps do not exist now, but it is not inconceivable that within not too long it could be used … especially when we see work in biology used by our government in Vietnam and in devising chemical and biological weapons,’ he said (Reinhold, 1969, p. 72). Beckwith’s fears grew after the emergence of rDNA, which made genetic manipulation far easier than it had been in 1969.

Feminist SftP members highlighted how new genetic technologies could offer new kinds of reproductive freedom to some women but harm women who were poor, ethnic minorities, had a disability, or did not conform to gender expectations of sexuality and marriage. Citing the United States’ ‘dismal history’ of immigration and sterilization laws, Ruth Hubbard wrote in 1983: ‘It is enormously important that the social consequences of trying to make decisions about what are “good” and “bad” genes be thoroughly examined and widely debated.’ ‘Professionals, who have no more than the required technical expertise,’ she continued, ‘must not be allowed to acquire the power to make and implement decisions about who is fit to be born’ (Hubbard, 1983). In the coming years, Hubbard and other SftP members wrote incisively about how genetic technologies could impact women and children (Arditti et al., 1970; Hubbard, 1983; Minden, 1985; Science for the People, 1987b).

The Pitfalls of For-Profit Biology

Second, the biologists in SftP—who held a broadly anti-capitalist position—anticipated that rDNA would transform molecular biology into an applied science, in which commercial motives loomed larger than ever (Rabinow, 1999; Jasanoff, 2006; Fortun, 2008; Helmreich, 2008). They understood that in a recombinant world, publications, grants, and prizes would no longer be biologists’ only currency of success. Patents and profits would hold sway as well.

Asilomar had already attracted an industry presence, including representatives from General Electric, the Merck Institute, the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology, and Searle (Wright, 1994: 146). In 1976, rDNA co-inventor Herbert Boyer and Robert Swanson established Genentech (Smith Hughes, 2011). In 1977, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office accelerated processing time for patent applications involving genetic manipulation, ‘in view of the exceptional importance of rDNA and the desirability of prompt disclosure of developments in the field’ (Wade, 1977, p. 559). And in 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Diamond v. Chakrabarty that life forms carrying a man-made genetically engineered component could be patented, laying the foundation for the modern biotech industry (Kevles, 1994). By then, the combined value of the four leading biotech companies—Cetus, Genentech, Genex, and Biogen—was about $500 million (Wade, 1980, p. 688).

Many biologists in SftP, including Beckwith and King, were so troubled by these new financial incentives that they sent an open letter voicing their concerns to their colleagues at Asilomar. ‘We have all had personal experience of the competitive and professional pressures which remove caution, prudence and a larger concern for social benefits,’ they wrote. Scientific careers were not built ‘solely on a concern for public health [or] for the well being of the underprivileged’ (Science for the People, 1981, p. 49). Careers were also built on the pursuit of fame, and now, of fortune. It was an astute prediction, as many Harvard biologists would go on to found lucrative biotech companies, raising challenges for the university and for the discipline.⁹

Importantly, SftP understood that biologists who understood life as the product of DNA might be tempted to pursue lucrative, ‘magic bullet’ recombinant therapies at the expense of patient safety and other lines of research. While rDNA brought new hope for ‘individuals suffering from rare genetic diseases,’ it also raised the possibility that ‘considerable risk may be taken by clinicians eager to apply advanced knowledge to effect new cures’ (Science for the People, 1981, p. 49). As attention to the need for transparency and informed consent in human subject research grew in the 1970s, SftP recognized that biotech pioneers who pushed their products into the clinic would have to be closely monitored (Epstein, 1996; Rothman, 1991). Ruth Hubbard noted that future gene therapy candidates would encounter practitioners who ‘reap the profits’ of the therapeutics they prescribe (Hubbard, 1983, p. 26). Indeed, in 1999, 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger died in a gene therapy trial run by a physician who had heavily invested in Genovo Inc., the company that sponsored his trial and held exclusive rights to license his patents.

In addition to identifying hazards that new genetic treatments might pose to patients, SftP stressed that important medical problems might be forgotten in the pursuit of recombinant therapies. In their open letter to Asilomar, they wrote that the search for ‘dramatic cures … often diverts attention from the massive health needs of the population as a whole and the need to prevent the epidemics of our time’ (Science for the People, 1981, p. 49). They feared that rDNA would deter efforts to solve some health problems, while promoting narrow, technical solutions to others.

In a 1977 New Scientist article, for example, Jonathan King wondered why, ‘despite the evidence that cancer in humans is largely due to exposure to carcinogens … the greatest part of the National Cancer Institute research budget is spent on searching for the elusive human tumor viruses rather than studying the nature of carcinogenic exposure’ (King, 1977, p. 636). To address cancer and other diseases, King and his colleagues argued, recombinant therapies would never be enough (Science for the People, 1980b, p. 4). In another 1977 article, King’s colleagues echoed that ‘supertherapies for intractible [sic] disease demand looking at the economic and social origins of most diseases and health problems … and exposing what the … ‘technical fix’ approach to healthcare means’ (Park and Thacher, 1977, p. 28–29). Both in their predictions of how lucrative recombinant products would become, and how these products would fall short of their promises, radical scientists were on the mark (Fortun, 2008). In the years after the Cambridge debate, SftP devoted several magazine issues to critiquing the biotech industry (Science for the People, 1980a, 1985, 1987a).

The Importance of Public Engagement

Finally, SftP fiercely believed that the biomedical establishment—like other scientific disciplines coming under scrutiny in the 1970s—should be held accountable to the public it was supposed to serve. In 1967, Berkeley physicist Charles Schwartz founded SftP after the American Physical Society refused to officially oppose the Vietnam War (Moore, 2008, p. 196–199; Bridger, 2015, p. 146–151; Schmalzer et al., 2018). In 1969, SftP participated in the March 4 Movement, a series of strikes held at MIT to protest the university’s involvement in wartime research (Moore and Hala, 2002, p. 326). Building on these earlier efforts, SftP called for broader involvement in scientific decision-making around rDNA in 1976.

In the wake of Asilomar, SftP repeatedly aired their dissatisfaction with the meeting’s self-regulatory model. In a 1976 article, Boston SftP member George Wald asked: ‘Is it possible for the same agency to both promote and regulate?’ He wondered if Asilomar would go down the same path as the disgraced Atomic Energy Commission, which had been ‘set up originally to regulate’ nuclear power but ended up promoting it—a move ‘that eventually destroyed it’ (Wald, 1976, p. 10). In their open letter to Asilomar, SftP explicitly stated that ‘decisions at this crossroad of biological research must not be made without public participation’ (Science for the People, 1981, p. 49). Though their request was ignored at Asilomar, these radical biologists effectively engaged the public in the Cambridge debate. Dorothy Nelkin wrote that SftP’s activism in Cambridge exemplified ‘the public nature of its activities and the willingness of activists to engage in and indeed, to abet political controversy … through the mass media, litigation, or appeals to citizen groups or political representatives’ (Nelkin, 1978, p. 35). One reporter who covered the controversy wrote that ‘the lack of a genuine attempt to involve the public has always been the major thrust of the criticism of rDNA research from Science for the People’ (Chedd, 1976, p. 15).

Since plans for high-containment facility emerged in 1975, Harvard faculty had kept discussions about its construction behind closed doors. But SftP and their allies became so vocal in their dissatisfaction with this insular state of affairs that the university held an open meeting on campus in May 1976 to field questions about the facility (Gottlieb and Jerome, 1976, p. 36). A few weeks later, Ruth Hubbard alerted Cambridge Mayor Alfred Vellucci about the proposed facility. Mayor Vellucci, infamous for his fierce anti-university campaigns (including a threat to pave Harvard Yard a parking lot), quickly scheduled a public hearing to discuss the facility with his fellow city councilors (Vellucci, 1977, p. 36). And on June 23, Harvard biologists on both sides of the rDNA issue found themselves testifying for hours in front of city officials and a jam-packed audience in Cambridge City Hall. At times unnervingly like an inquisition,’ one reporter described, the hearing was ‘the first major public clash between scientists planning genetic engineering experiments, and representatives of the community in which those experiments will be performed’ (The Real Paper, 1977, p. 103).

Mayor Vellucci guided the hearing with flair, relentlessly questioning the Harvard scientists who testified before him. ‘Is it true that in the history of science, mistakes have been made?’ he asked. ‘Do scientists ever exercise poor judgment? Do they ever have accidents? Do you possess enough foresight and wisdom to decide which direction the future of mankind should take?’ he questioned relentlessly (Cambridge City Council Hearing, 1976, p. 55). While facility supporters struggled to answer, the biologists in SftP took the mayor’s skepticism in stride. ‘Whether you use this pipette or that pipette, that’s a scientific issue,’ Jonathan King told Vellucci. ‘Whether you go ahead with research … that’s a social policy issue. The people here pay the taxes and they bear the risk and they’re supposed to reap the benefits. Well, let them decide. Let them decide’ (Cambridge City Council Hearing, 1976, p. 135–136).¹⁰ Indeed, the City Council established a moratorium on rDNA work in Cambridge while the CERB deliberated on how to move forward.

SftP drove debate on rDNA into the public sphere because they wanted to challenge the power structures that governed laboratory life at Harvard, and begin a conversation about gender and class dynamics in scientific decision-making. ‘The scientific world is no democracy,’ one reporter covering the controversy wrote. ‘It is a hierarchical, aristocratic world, in which a man speaks with the authority of his accomplishment’ (Lubow, 1977, p. 124). SftP understood this, and tried to foster a more equitable mode of decision-making around rDNA. The Boston chapter’s commitment to inclusivity was reflected in its roster: a reporter described its membership in 1976 as ‘one-third workers, secretaries, and draftsmen in scientific establishments; one-third high school science teachers, computer programmers, and technicians; and one-third academics and professionals, including industry scientists, professors and students.’ Within the organization, ‘academic or professional credentials carr[ied] no status or privileges’ (Frawley, 1976).

This is not to say that SftP was perfect in meeting its goals toward inclusivity. Though the organization partnered with organization of color, its members were largely white. And while the group had a committed core of feminist members, they were often dissatisfied with the organization’s attention to gender issues (Botelho, 2018b). Despite these shortcomings, however, SftP made explicit efforts to work in solidarity with women, poor people, and people of color in Cambridge.

SftP was most concerned about Harvard’s lab technicians, dish washers, and custodians: the workers who would be directly exposed to rDNA’s potential hazards but would not reap any rewards of the research, nor have a say in how the technology was used. ‘There was a blue collar community in the biology department’ at Harvard, King recalled in an interview years later, and ‘for those of us in Science for the People, because of our social and political analyses, these people were very important to us’ (King, 2012). Indeed, in their open letter to Asilomar, SftP urged their colleagues to ‘involve those immediately at risk—technicians, students, custodial staff, and so forth—in collective decision-making on safety policy for the laboratory’ (Science for the People, 1981, p. 49). These demands, ignored at Asilomar, were also difficult to operationalize in Cambridge.

In the spring of 1976, SftP was denied NIH funding to send several women who worked in Harvard’s laboratory kitchens to a public hearing about rDNA in Washington, D.C. (Cambridge City Council Hearing, 1976, p. 116–117). The organization also petitioned unsuccessfully to appoint technical workers to Harvard’s biohazards committee (Gottlieb and Jerome, 1976, p. 36). SftP’s outreach to the Cambridge mayor was another attempt to fight for these workers’ interests. ‘Mayor Vellucci and the City Council understood that in a situation which required a balance of risk versus benefit, the benefits (excitement, prestige, intellectual stimulation, scientific advancement) were most likely to come to professors living in the suburbs, while the risks of infection were much more likely to fall on the lab workers, glassware washers, and custodians living in Cambridge,’ King explained (King, 1977, p. 635). Hubbard also emphasized the importance of including women—who held little power at Harvard either as faculty or staff—in the rDNA debate. She acknowledged later that she was a more effective activist outside of the academy than within it, and said that her experiences as a woman in science spurred her to speak out (Hubbard, 1978, p. 29, 32). In this light, the Cambridge debate gave SftP an opportunity to expose how scientific decision-making at Harvard remained within the hands of its powerful academic fraternity.

After the City Hall hearing, SftP continued to engage their community. ‘For several summer weekends,’ historian Everett Mendelsohn recalled, ‘Cantabridgians could find scientists in their shirtsleeves with molecular models, illustrations, and texts hard at work explaining the “basics” of genetics and DNA experimentation to an amused, often quite attentive citizenry’ (Mendelsohn, 1984, p. 324). During the next several months, SftP members handed out pamphlets and held teach-ins to educate the public about the fundamentals of rDNA (Figure 3).

Figure 3:

Science for the People flyer for educational ‘teach-in’ on rDNA.

Courtesy of the Recombinant DNA History Collection at the MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections.

In the meantime, the CERB deliberated on the future of rDNA research in their community. Their work, one reporter wrote, ‘represented the first time that the public had been given the opportunity to declare its own unaided opinion on the risks and benefits of gene splicing technique’ (Wade, 1980, p. 132). The final decision on rDNA’s fate in Cambridge was handed to the city manager, an engineer, a social worker, a housewife, a professor (Krimsky), a doctor, a nun, a former city councilor, and the city health officer.¹¹ In their final recommendations to the City Council, the CERB requested that local citizens and lab technicians be included on Harvard’s biohazards committees, and asked that a separate, municipal biohazards committee be established to monitor research in the city. In February 1977, their demands were incorporated into a city ordinance: the first piece of legislation on rDNA in the U.S. Their work, as many scholars have argued, is a remarkable example of lay regulation of science during the emergence of genetic engineering (Bereano, 1984; Goggin et al., 1984; Krimsky, 1978; Goodell, 1979).

In 1976, the radical biologists in SftP distinguished themselves from their colleagues at Asilomar by embracing the social issues that surrounded rDNA, and welcoming the public into conversations about how to regulate the technology. In their final report, the CERB paid homage to SftP’s efforts. ‘We recognize that the controversy over the use of the rDNA technology was brought to the public’s attention by a small group of scientists with a deep concern for their fellow citizens and responsibility to their profession,’ the committee wrote. ‘To them we owe our gratitude for broadening the context in which the issues are being discussed’ (The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 1977, p. 128–129). Thanks in no small part to SftP, the CERB conducted a landmark negotiation of informed consent to biomedical research in their community.

SftP’s Radical Insights in the CRISPR Era

There is no doubt that unique institutional tensions and town-gown rifts shaped the Cambridge rDNA controversy, and SftP’s activism there. Though SftP’s local organizing strategies may not be effective in all communities or at all levels of regulation, these activist-scientists anticipated many of the social dilemmas that CRISPR presents today. In light of recent alarm over He Jiankui’s embryonic gene-editing, SftP’s early analyses around genetic reductionism, the commercialization of biotech, and the public regulation of science remain deeply relevant for those who hope to deploy CRISPR ethically and equitably.

First, SftP’s critiques of genetic reductionism—so unpopular among molecular biologists during the 1970s—are now commonplace. Leading geneticists today concede that most common diseases are driven by only a small genetic component (Lander, 2015). The explosive growth of research on the exome, epigenome, proteome, and microbiome (to name a few) reveals a renewed focus on biological complexity that SftP had stressed nearly half a century earlier. Yet scientists like He Jiankui continue to operate with a naïve optimism of how gene-editing impacts an individual’s biology, let alone an entire society’s health. The sloppiness of his editing procedure reflects a willful ignorance of how genes interact with their environments. More broadly, his work represents a failure to understand that the suffering and stigma associated with HIV will not be eased through a reductionist ‘genetic fix,’ but through social action and wider access to contraceptives and antiretroviral medications.

Second, SftP’s prediction that rDNA would turn biology into big business has also borne out. Ironically, Cambridge’s city ordinance on rDNA cleared the way for the city to grow into one of the world’s densest biotech hubs, and today Cambridge is home to two premier CRISPR biotech firms (Ledford, 2015b). The companies, each led by a CRISPR co-discoverer, were locked in a bitter patent war for nearly a decade (Ledford, 2016, 2018). In the face of such intense commercial interests, STS scholar Ruha Benjamin urged biologists at the 2015 Summit not to accept a ‘trickle-down biotech’ phenomenon, which would keep the fruits of CRISPR far from the hands of the poor (Benjamin, 2015).

Yet just months later, He Jiankui attempted a costly genetic prophylactic for a disease that predominately affects people who cannot access basic contraceptives and medications, let alone CRISPR-aided in vitro fertilization (Cohen, 2018). A CRISPR fix for the privileged few will never create the HIV-free world that He envisions. But in the process of exacerbating disparities in HIV treatment and prevention, his CRISPR interventions could make him rich, just as SftP predicted. After all, even though He worked outside the bounds of his academic institution and Chinese law, he retains ownership of his two gene-editing companies and continues to recruit new converts with slick online public relations campaigns of his research (He et al., 2018).

Finally, SftP anticipated that expert self-regulation would never adequately address genetic engineering’s many dangers and pitfalls. Like Jasanoff, who in 2015 questioned whether or not ‘an expert summit’ was ‘the right instrument of democratic deliberation on gene-editing,’ these radical scientists would probably have many objections to the design and outcomes of the CRISPR Summits (Jasanoff et al., 2015, p. 30). Though the recent Summits were open to the public and featured greater disciplinary and geographic inclusivity than Asilomar, the meetings were still thoroughly geared towards experts. And at both Summits’ end, the organizers came to their own private consensus on how to move forward with CRISPR embryonic gene-editing, rather than engage in some form of democratic decision-making (Baltimore et al., 2015; Baltimore et al., 2018). In the wake of He’s announcement, however, it is clear that any kind of expert consensus achieved at these Summits must be supplemented with a wide range of creative regulatory frameworks that fit the many communities where CRISPR technologies will be deployed. As stakeholders develop this ecosystem of gene-editing regulations, there are new opportunities to learn from SftP’s success in fostering democratic technoscientific governance in Cambridge. Their effort to amplify the voices of vulnerable stakeholders and adjudicate rDNA through existing channels of local governance is a historic case worth revisiting as new models of public deliberation and regulation are developed in the CRISPR era.

Conclusion

In this moment of uncertainty about the future of embryonic CRISPR gene-editing, it is crucial to move beyond the Asilomar narrative and broaden our historical understanding of how scientists responded to the challenges of genetic engineering in the past. A close study of SftP’s scholarship and activism during the 1976 Cambridge rDNA controversy offers fresh insights from the early biotech years for those in pursuit of a socially biotechnological practice, informed by deep understandings of power and social equity.

With a radical sensibility and a deep skepticism of technical solutions to social problems, SftP developed incisive analyses of genetic reductionism, the commercialization of biotechnology, and the power of public engagement in scientific decision-making. Far before their colleagues at Asilomar, these activist-biologists recognized the dangers of a DNA-centric view of life. They thought about how genetic technologies might exacerbate social inequities, if harnessed with profit in mind. And they were successful public educators who sparked a unique public adjudication of rDNA in their community. Thanks in part to SftP’s organizing, Cambridge passed the first piece of legislation on rDNA in the U.S. These radical scientists’ insights and activist strategies are urgently needed as we look ahead to a future with embryonic CRISPR gene-editing.

Throughout this period, SftP also forged important intellectual connections with an embryonic community of radical and feminist science studies scholars who laid a foundation for STS scholarship on biotechnology and biomedicine into the coming decades. The 1976 Cambridge recombinant DNA controversy, then, offers a powerful shared history of radical scientist-activists and science studies scholars who were developing some of the earliest and sharpest social critiques of genetic engineering.

Finally, SftP’s history illustrates enduring tensions between radical and liberal modes of understanding, and regulating, gene-editing technologies. Undoubtedly, SftP would have critiqued the CRISPR Summits—meetings by experts for experts—as a limited, liberal vision of change. As Sheila Jasanoff described, such Summits can only ever offer a ‘view from the mountaintop’ (Jasanoff et al., 2015, p. 30). SftP scientists would also likely have argued that the Summit organizers, like most liberal policymakers today, promote science as an objective and apolitical practice that could be corrupted by negative social forces—if scientists and the public lost their vigilance.

As made clear in their activism in Cambridge, SftP thought differently. They understood that scientific work done under oppressive power structures would always benefit the ruling class over the historically disenfranchised, no matter the extent of institutional reform or public outreach. They believed that science was an inherently political activity that could be directed to serve liberatory ends, but only if workers of all kinds mobilized to make it so (Schmalzer, 2017; Laskow, 2018; Onion, 2018). And they realized these convictions through their science, pedagogy, and organizing.

As such, SftP continues to set an example for scientists and science studies scholars who want to collaborate outside of their disciplines and partner with their communities to create a science that works in direct solidarity with society’s vulnerable, rather than a science that feigns social engagement but ultimately fails to challenge the status quo. This, above all, was what the biologists in SftP were trying to do in the Cambridge rDNA controversy. They knew there was no other time but now. ‘Rarely do we stand with so lucid a picture of the emerging technology at our doorstep,’ they wrote in their magazine, ‘and rarely do we have the power to influence and control the destiny of that technology as we do now in the case of biotechnology’ (Science for the People, 1985, p. 2). Half a century later, Science for the People’s critiques of genetic engineering and their conviction in the power of radical social action continue to offer lessons for socially conscious biotechnological practice in the CRISPR era.

Biographical note:

Alyssa Botelho is an MD-PhD student at Harvard Medical School and the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University.