JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
A new technology that promises to change the world but also carries existential risks, a call for a slowdown from the leaders in that industry - sounds like an AI story ripped from the headlines, right? But as Nick Fountain from NPR's Planet Money reports, it's actually a story ripped from the biology lab.
NICK FOUNTAIN, BYLINE: Yeah, biology - story goes that in the early '70s, Janet Mertz was getting a Ph.D. in biochemistry.
Did you have ambition of winning a Nobel?
JANET MERTZ: We were all thinking about that (laughter) back in that era.
FOUNTAIN: All right. I'm glad you admitted it.
She was working on the cutting edge, which was all about cutting - cutting up DNA from one organism and putting it into another organism - in other words, recombining it.
MERTZ: Prior to that, people would make recombinants using natural methods. So...
FOUNTAIN: But now, all of a sudden, there was the possibility of copying a gene from a bird and pasting it into a bee.
MERTZ: That's right, yeah.
FOUNTAIN: This technology had tons of promise - mass-produced insulin, new plants that self-fertilized, cures for diseases. But first, a roadblock - the story goes that Mertz herself was doing an experiment that involved a cancer-causing virus and E. coli. And in 1971, she told her plans to Bob Pollack, another biologist.
And what happened next?
MERTZ: Bob Pollack sort of freaked out.
BOB POLLACK: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. This is a dangerous protein.
FOUNTAIN: Bob Pollack, obviously. He thought, what if this thing broke bad - a new superbug?
MERTZ: You could give the world cancer.
POLLACK: This scares the hell out of me.
FOUNTAIN: Pollack sounded the alarm bells, and Mertz's thesis adviser canceled her experiment. Scientific advancement itself was now the danger. But also, no one lab wanted to stop and give others the lead or the Nobel. And this is when a really wild thing happened, the pause. In 1974, Mertz's boss and some other lab heads put out an open letter saying we're all going to pause our cutting-edge research and meet up and agree on some new safety measures.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Yeah, good morning, I think.
FOUNTAIN: The meetup is now known as the Asilomar conference. There, a who's who of scientists argued over what guardrails to put on their research or whether they should at all. Amazingly, there are still recordings of it in the National Academies archive.
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ALEX CAPRON: Freedom of thought does not encompass freedom to cause physical injury to others.
FOUNTAIN: Bioethicist Alex Capron was one of the few nonscientists there. He talked about liability and told people, if you don't regulate yourselves, Congress might.
So you were there to scare the living daylights out of these nerds.
CAPRON: Yeah. Did you say nerds?
FOUNTAIN: (Laughter).
CAPRON: I'm not - I don't adopt that phrase.
FOUNTAIN: In the end, most of the participants agreed on lab protocols and other guardrails. In other words, faced with a scary new technology, leaders got together, overcame their personal interests and figured out a way to solve the collective action problem. It can happen. You hear that, AI industry? Nick Fountain, NPR News.
SUMMERS: Are there lessons for the billionaires dilemma or tech elite face right now? You bet there are. We've gathered a few on a recent episode of Planet Money. Find it wherever you get your podcasts.
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