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The calculated shock treatment worked. Toiling through the night, Berg and his committee drafted recommendations that the conferees readily accepted before their departure the next day. They voted not only to continue the ban on the worrisome experiments, but also to press NIH to establish levels of safety that should be required for different experiments. In addition, they decided that precautions to keep research organisms from escaping from laboratories had to include "biological containment." This required the creation of mutated strains of E. coli so disabled that they could live nowhere but in a test tube. If they did escape their special broth and enter the atmosphere—or human gut—they would die almost instantly (see box).
Although the scientists left Asilomar thinking that they had allayed public fear about their work, they had only managed to fan it. Newspapers, which had until then paid scant attention to the story of recombinant DNA, erupted with scare headlines, alarming the nation with exaggerated doomsday prophecies. Two months later, Ted Kennedy held his first hearings on the new genetics. Some scientists, joined by politicians, began questioning whether the molecular biologists should do their own policing. Said one: "This is probably the first time in history that the incendiaries formed their own fire brigade."
The gibe seemed aimed particularly at another Stanford scientist, David Hogness, who was leading the way in a new form of genetic roulette, appropriately called "shotgun" experiments. Hogness was using enzymes to fragment the DNA of fruit flies and then was inserting the gene material piecemeal into bacteria. That way he could reproduce the inserted genes in vast quantities and discover their functions. The technique seems to be working. To date, he has managed to isolate and identify 36 of the thousands of the fruit fly's genes. But critics fear that because the nature of many of the genes is totally unknown beforehand, the host bacteria might be endowed with some dangerous new characteristic. What irritated the opponents of recombinant DNA even more was the fact that Hogness was in charge of a subcommittee appointed by the National Institutes of Health to draft the guidelines. That, said M.I.T.'s Jonathan King, leading member of the radical Science for the People organization, was like "having the chairman of General Motors write the specifications for safety belts."