In 1975, the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA was organized by Paul Berg, a pioneer of recombinant DNA technology, at a conference center at Asilomar State Beach in California. Physicians, scientists, lawyers, ethicists, and others gathered to draft guidelines for safe applications of recombinant DNA technology. These general guidelines were adopted by the federal government and are still in practice today. Consider the implications of recombinant DNA as a new technology. What concerns might the scientific community have had then about recombinant DNA technology? Might those same concerns exist today?

Video transcript

Hello, everyone and welcome to today's video of Hallberg, a biochemist at Stanford was one of the first to develop recombinant DNA technology in his experimental design. In 1974 Oberg cleaved the monkey virus as we he then cleaved the double helix of another virus which was an antibacterial agent known as bacteria fish Atlanta. In the third step, he fast and D N A from the SV 42 D N A from the bacteriophage lambda. The final step involves placing the mudra genetic material into a laboratory strain of E coli bacterium. However, Berg did not complete his final step due to which of these following scenarios begin by answer choice B due to the possibility of biohazards experiments, cloning DNA containing toxic genes were out loud. Well, no, because he got all four to the point where he was about to finish his experiment on all of this was legal because of this is going to be an incorrect statement and we're going to eliminate it. Then we have see large scale recombinant DNA experiment that produce products that could be harmful to humans and more plants were out loud due to the inability of the then current safety measures to contain the potential biohazards. This sounds like it is a correct statement. However, this is also fall because these were illegal back then. He was not doing anything illegal by performing this experiment. Instead. What occurred is that the other researchers were concerned that the final step might produce clone SV 40 DNA. It might have replicated the DNA that could get into the surrounding environment and infect lab workers. After that, these workers might get cancer through these very harmful piece of genetic information. So this was more of a moral issue that stopped them rather than a legal one. As many other of the answer choices are stating. So answer choice A is going to be the correct answer to our question. I really hope this video helped you and I hope to see you on the next one.