AI and the regulation of recombinant DNA

I was in college during the dawning of molecular cloning. By 1981, I was using recombinant DNA in my PhD research, and within a few months of starting my postdoc in 1982, I was engineering clones. In my career, I’ve made libraries of recombinant DNA molecules in bacteria and engineered dozens of transgenic fruit flies.

The current fears over unregulated AI reminded me immediately of the fears raised about recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s.

“In two urgent letters in 1973 and 1974, scientists first called for “prudence” — the same word used this month by Anthropic’s Dario Amodei in his 3,800-word plea for regulation of A.I. Then they called for a moratorium on all recombinant DNA work until it could be done safely.

“Work stopped until scientists gathered at Asilomar aiming to come up with regulations to end the moratorium. Organizers warned the group, which included scientists from other countries including the Soviet Union, that if they couldn’t self-regulate, Congress would do it for them. They wanted to avoid legislation “at all costs,” one scientist later recalled, because lawmakers might get it wrong and it would be harder to change.

 

“They debated the potential hazards of the work over four heated days. On the final evening, the lawyers in the room steered the discussion to potential courtroom scenes. That prompted scientists to propose specific regulations around physical containment, scaled from P1 to P4 according to perceived risk.

“These new rules, which the National Institutes of Health later approved and enforced, included negative-airflow rooms and pressurized protective suits for labs doing the riskiest work. Microbes had to be programmed to die outside lab conditions, and scientists banned the creation of deadly toxins or antibiotic-resistant bacteria.”

I remember reading and following the NIH regulations and including boilerplate in my grant proposals asserting that the regulations would be followed. Ultimately, most of the concerns were overblown and the rules relaxed. There are still strict rules for handling experiments involving the most dangerous human pathogens.

Of course, regulation of AI, like regulation of recombinant DNA research, requires world-wide compliance. This broke down in China recently, when two children were born who had each been genetically engineered using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing. The investigator was imprisoned for a couple years, a sentence unlikely to deter other scientists. I fail to see how AI regulations will be any more effective, but the consequences of rogue AI technology will be far more devasting and proliferate far more rapidly.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/us/asilomar-dna-ai-self-regulation-laws.html?unlocked_article_code=1.EVE.CxEH.rxWb1hukQXif&smid=fb-share&fbclid=IwY2xjawUmF7lleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBwZG9mAXNydGMGYXBwX2lkEDIyMjAzOTE3ODgyMDA4OTIAAR6ZoQl1RC72cX_o5RkRIvUdRIGUfcBqJ6BewUmEz7OaUBT6b93ffU4tx53okA_aem_K0Aj2YQ2eHP5bW_MsO663w