Global Civil Society: The Dire Consequences of Secretive Biotech Regulation
Jonathan Latham
The first Asilomar conference of 1975 has been both celebrated and condemned. Whichever way you lean it was certainly a pivotal moment in the history of biotechnology. Californian researchers working on GM microbes and GM viruses faced pushback for the first time on the potential hazards involved and gradually came to realise that their experiments might be dangerous and needed oversight. The critical question (for them) became: who would do the oversight? The public? The government? The...