This week, 200 scientists will gather in an attempt to determine how research into the possibilities of geoengineering the planet to combat climate change should proceed.

They say it's necessary because of the riskiness and scale of the experiments that could be undertaken – and the moral implications of their work to intentionally alter the Earth's climate.

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The group is meeting at the Asilomar resort in California, a dreamy enclave a few hours south of San Francisco. The gathering intentionally harkens back to the February 1975 meeting there of molecular biologists hashing out rules to govern what was then the hot-button scientific issue of the day: recombinant DNA and the possibility of biohazards.

The 1975 process wasn't perfect, but after a fraught and meandering few days, the scientists released a joint statement that placed some restrictions and conditions on research, particularly with pathogens. That meeting is now held up as a model for how researchers can successfully assume the mantle of self-regulation.

"And perhaps that was the final, foggy significance of Asilomar: a promise that the scientists who deal with the most fundamental of life stuff will not sequester themselves beneath Chicago stadiums or within blockhouses in the New Mexico desert – that their work, at least as significant as the most subtle of sub-nuclear manipulations, will be done with care and public scrutiny," wrote Michael Rogers in a June 19, 1975 Rolling Stone article.

Organized by the Climate Response Fund, a new group created to support geoengineering, this week's conference is self-consciously recalling its famous Asilomar predecessor: All the participants in the new conference were sent Rogers' article.

A conference brochure summed up the popular attitude toward its predecessor, praising it "as a landmark effort in self-regulation by the scientific community" and attributing the lack of "dangerous releases of organisms modified with recombinant DNA" to the "effectiveness of the ultimate guidelines and procedures." It includes a black-and-white photograph of 1975 scientists meeting in the resort's hoary chapel (above).

But in important ways the the two Asilomars are different. The Climate Response Fund was founded by Margaret Leinen, who although a respected scientist, had a commercial interest in a company doing geoengineering. The original Asilomar had a more official provenance: It was organized by the National Academy of Sciences with $100,000 from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

But even if the two conferences were identical, the real history of the '75 Asilomar conference highlights the problems of scientific self-governance as much as the solutions it offers. It was messier than most would probably like to recall.

Crucially, the 1975 Asilomar meeting sidestepped the question of how recombinant DNA research should be done and who it should benefit, in favor of the more technical question of how it could be done more safely.

"The recombinant DNA issue was defined as a technical problem to be solved by technical means, a technical fix," wrote MIT historian of science Charles Wiener in a 2001 retrospective. "Larger ethical issues regarding the purposes of the research; long-term goals, including human genetic intervention; and possible abuses of the research were excluded."

This year's version of Asilomar could draw even more attention to the fundamental tension of scientific self-regulation of risk- and value-laden experiments. While many of the field's top scientists are attending the meeting, it has drawn criticism from high-level scientists with an interest in geoengineering like Stanford's Ken Caldeira and the University of Calgary's David Keith.

"My only concern about this meeting is that the convening organization, [Climate Response Fund] is nontransparent and appears to be closely tied to Climos which was conceived to do ocean fertilization for profit," Keith wrote. "While I am happy to see profit-driven startups drive innovation, I think tying ocean fertilization to carbon credits was a sterling example of how not to govern climate engineering, and I am therefore concerned to see a closely linked organization at the center of a meeting on governance. A meeting on governance ought to start by having transparent and disinterested governance."

Despite Keith's strongly worded statement about the conference, he has decided to attend to, as he put it, "speak out." Caldeira declined his invitation, telling Wired.com that he preferred governance meetings held by "established professional societies and non-profits without a stake in the outcomes."

The 1975 Asilomar conference did go through more established routes and even with that pedigree, the molecular biologists struggled to come up with a decision-making strategy that could address the concerns of the public.

"The motive from the start was to reduce potential hazards and to proceed with the research, avoiding public interference by demonstrating that scientists on their own could protect laboratory workers, the public and the environment," MIT's Wiener continued. "Of course, this action contained a contradiction: They were dealing with a public health issue and simultaneously attempting to keep the public out of it."

Certainly, there's a logic to letting experts in a scientific field decide about the field's future. The presumption is that those closest to the science know its possibilities – both good and bad – best. Yet, that assumes that the science is guiding the proceedings.

Rolling Stone's Rogers recorded a remarkable amount of confusion and the suggestion that the conference's organizers had structured the rules to protect their own lines of research, while limiting other people's work. In a March 22, 1975 article, Science News' Janet Weinberg described the scientists' collective response to draft rules as "a barrage of unyielding, self-indulgent, and conflicting attitudes."

This historical reality led Tufts University bioethicist Sheldon Krimsky to write that the modest regulations that emerged from Asilomar were not based on some systematic definition of risk, in the 1982 book, Genetic Alchemy: The Social History of the Recombinant DNA Controversy. Rather, they represented a much more human solution, a "negotiated settlement among scientists incorporating some science and considerable conjecture and intuition."

While most scientists believe that the Asilomar meeting was a qualified success, some do not. The most outspoken, DNA co-discoverer, James Watson, reportedly blurted out during panel on risk, "These people have made up guidelines that don't apply to their own experiments." Watson argues the conference led to the creation of "totally capricious and totally unnecessary" guidelines and actually made the public more afraid of biotechnology. In 1978, Watson railed against Asilomar and similar meetings, saying they were "a real theater of the absurd in which the only professionals were a bizarre collection of kooks, sad incompetents, and down-right shits."

It's obvious but worth noting that Watson was concerned that science was, and would be, too limited. In fact, he had experiments that he had to put off for two years due to the regulations. But social scientists have generally drawn the opposite conclusion about Asilomar's power to limit science.

Susan Wright, a historian of science at the University of Michigan, has called the bargain supposedly struck at Asilomar – some research restrictions in exchange for scientific self-governance – a myth on both sides of the deal.

"It is a myth that most scientists working under competitive pressures can address the implications of their own work with dispassion and establish appropriately stringent controls – any more than an unregulated Bill Gates can give competing browsers equal access to the world wide web," she wrote. "Sure enough, some five years later, the controls proposed at Asilomar and developed by the National Institutes of Health were dismantled without anything like adequate knowledge of the hazards."

Further, she says, "it is equally a myth that scientists in this field are self-governing." Instead, their research agendas are shaped by utilitarian interests of government or corporate sponsors. Even at that early stage, before the biotech boom of later years, molecular biologists were never doing pure science.

Even researchers who consider the 1975 Asilomar conference a success, who convened on its 25th anniversary realize that the its process is no longer feasible.

"While there is general agreement that the 1975 Asilomar meeting made a large contribution to the resolution of a major scientific policy issue, it was clearly the consensus at the 2000 meeting that perceptions of science and of scientists have changed so drastically over the last quarter century that it is virtually inconceivable that a similar format could be successful today," wrote the editors of Perspectives in Biology in a special issue in 2001.

The Asilomar conference this week will have to deal head-on with these dilemmas. Odds are, no matter what happens, any statement that comes out of the meeting will be incomplete, unfinished and provisional. It should also incorporate and remain open to input from critics of geoengineering.

Perhaps, the messy negotiations of parties guided by science and their own interests will push the discussion to the sensitive middle ground that the 1975 conference found, making no one totally happy, but recognizing the potential – good and bad – of a radical new field of scientific inquiry.

Images: National Academy of Sciences. Top image is of the press room.

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