Shifting Values and Shifting Risks: Debates on the New Biology in Germany and the United States Before and After...

This article argues that while the 1975 Asilomar Conference on Recombinant Molecules gave rise to new developments in science policy, the subsequent debates about genetic engineering should not be viewed in isolation, but rather in the larger historical context of discussions on a new biology that began as early as the 1960s. The new field of molecular biology was at that time already hotly debated by holistic biologists, sociologists, and philosophers in West Germany. In part, these debates were a reaction against the utopian views of some leading US scientists whose imaginaries about cloning and genetically modified man came under serious critique after the CIBA Foundation symposium Man and his Future (1962). As a result, some German philosophers, scientists and sociologists framed the new biology against the historical background of Nazi eugenics. In the 1970s and 1980s, when the new social movements (peace movement, anti-nuclear power movement, ecology movement, feminist movement) started to debate genetic engineering, the public and political controversies about recombinant DNA technologies remained closely intertwined with issues of cloning, embryo research and in-vitro fertilization (IVF). This discursive assemblage was often framed by dystopian fears about human genetic engineering. The article traces these multi-layered discourses and analyzes the continuities and changes in the debates from the 1960s to the 1980s in West Germany while comparing them with developments in the United States. It demonstrates how different understandings of gene technologies and their future impact on society collided and how different concepts of risk developed among both scientists and the public after Asilomar.