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Once Boyer and Cohen had combined two E. coli plasmids, they turned to another species. Working with John Morrow of Stanford University, they cut up fragments of DNA from an African clawed frog and inserted it in a plasmid, which they then inserted in E. coli. Now they had created a chimera that was part E. coli, part animal.

When Boyer described his chimeras at a conference in New Hampshire in 1973, the audience of scientists was shocked. None of them could say the experiments were safe. They sent a letter to the National Academy of Sciences to express their concern, and a conversation spread through scientific circles. What could scientists realistically hope to do with engineered E. coli? What were the plausible risks?

The possibilities sounded as outlandish as anything Haldane had dreamed of fifty years earlier. E. coli could make precious molecules, such as human insulin, which could treat diabetes. E. coli might acquire genes for breaking down cellulose, the tough fibers in plants. A person who swallowed cellulose-eating E. coli might be able to live on grass. Or maybe engineering E. coli would lead to disaster. A cellulose-digesting microbe might cause people to absorb too many calories and become hideously obese. Or perhaps it might rob people of the benefits of undigested roughage—including, perhaps, protection from cancer.

Paul Berg and thirteen other prominent scientists wrote a letter to the National Academy of Sciences in 1974 calling for a moratorium on transferred genes—also known as recombinant DNA—until scientists could agree on some guidelines. The first pass at those guidelines emerged from a meeting Berg organized in February 1975 at the Asilomar Conference Grounds on the California coast. Rather than calling for an outright ban on genetic engineering, the scientists advocated a ladder of increasingly strict controls. The greater the chance an experiment might cause harm, the more care scientists should take to prevent engineered organisms from escaping. Some particularly dangerous experiments, such as shuttling genes for powerful toxins into new hosts, ought not to be carried out at all. The National Institutes of Health followed up on the Asilomar meeting by forming a committee to set up official guidelines later that year.

To scientists such as Berg, these steps seemed reasonable. They had taken time to give genetic engineering some serious reflection, and they had decided that its risks could be managed. Genetic engineering was unlikely to trigger a new cancer epidemic, for example, because from childhood on people were already exposed to cancer-causing viruses. Many scientists concluded that E. coli K-12 had become so feeble after decades of laboratory luxury that it probably could not survive in the human gut. A biologist named H. William Smith announced at Asilomar that he had drunk a solution of E. coli K-12 and found no trace of it in his stool. But to be even more certain that no danger would come from genetic engineering, Roy Curtiss, a University of Alabama microbiologist, created a superfeeble strain that was a hundred million times weaker than K-12.

Other scientists did not feel as confident. Liebe Cavalieri, a biochemist at the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York, published an essay in The New York Times Magazine called “New Strains of Life—or Death.” Below the headline was a giant portrait of E. coli embracing one another with their slender alien pili. Meet your new Frankenstein.

Soon the scientific critics were joined by politicians and activists. Congress opened hearings on genetic engineering, and representatives introduced a dozen bills calling for various levels of control. City politicians took action as well. The mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Alfred Vellucci, held raucous hearings on Harvard’s entry into the genetic engineering game. The city banned genetic engineering altogether for months. Protesters waved signs at scientific conferences, and environmental groups filed lawsuits against the National Institutes