“No recombination without representation!”
The protest sign, raised in a packed Cambridge, Massachusetts, hearing room during the summer of 1976, borrowed the language of the American Revolution to press a bold claim: rdinary citizens deserved a say in the future of a powerful new science alongside the Nobel laureates in the room.
The fight was over recombinant DNA, the then-new ability to splice genetic material from one organism into another. Supporters called it the future of biology. Critics feared possible public health hazards, and the city’s mayor likened it to releasing Frankenstein bugs in the sewer. What the hearing produced was quieter than the spectacle that sparked it: a citizen-led review board that spent months crafting research guidelines, one of the earliest moments of direct public involvement in governing biotechnology. Those policies helped make Cambridge a global biotech capital.
The moment is drawing fresh attention as the United States marks 250 years since its founding. The questions it raised about who has standing to shape a technology that could remake society run straight through today’s debates over artificial intelligence and gene editing. Luis Campos, the Baker College Associate Professor for History of Science, Technology and Innovation at Rice University, revisits it in “Recombining Representation,” a new essay featured in the journal Science’s issue on American science at 250.
“Even though we’re talking about recombinant DNA from 50 years ago, people might have AI going through their heads, people might have the pandemic going through their heads,” Campos said. “The technologies that are at the heart of public debates today might be different than those 50 years ago, but the ways that we make sense of new technologies, weighing the prospects and risks they bear, are often familiar.”
Campos studies the history of biology and biotechnology. He organized “The Spirit of Asilomar and the Future of Biotechnology,” a 2025 international summit at the site of the landmark 1975 Asilomar meeting on recombinant DNA, and he is the author of “Radium and the Secret of Life” and co-editor of “Nature Remade: Engineering Life, Envisioning Worlds.”
Campos is available to discuss the hearing, its legacy and what it reveals about who gets to govern powerful new technology. He can speak to the origins of genetic engineering, the role of public participation in regulating science, how the Cambridge hearing shaped the modern biotech industry and what that history suggests for governing fast-moving fields such as AI.