GENETICS × TECHNOLOGY

Cutting and Pasting Genes

1973 CE

Phanerozoic · Cenozoic · Quaternary · Holocene · Meghalayan

Restriction enzymes cut DNA at chosen sequences and a ligase joins the cut ends, so a gene taken from one organism can be dropped into another and copied by it. Within two years the field had stopped itself: the researchers called a moratorium on their own most promising experiments and met at Asilomar to work out which ones should be allowed.

Why it matters

Biology became an engineering discipline, and its practitioners were the first to ask what should be forbidden, before any regulator did. That precedent is invoked every time a new technology raises the same question, which is why the meeting is argued about more than the method.

Sources

1. Cohen et al. (1973), PNAS · Construction of biologically functional bacterial plasmids in vitro
2. Cobb (2025), Nature · Money and murder: the dark side of the Asilomar meeting on recombinant DNA
3. Scheffler (2025), Journal of the History of Biology · Asilomar goes underground: the long legacy of recombinant DNA hazard debates

Earth history as one day

23:59:59.99901.0 ms before midnight

if Earth’s 4.54 billion years were compressed into a single day