In the hot, crowded chambers of the Cambridge city council, a student musical group recently kicked off a public hearing with a note of unity — an a capella rendition of Woody Guthrie’s iconic “This Land is Your Land.”
It wasn’t a real city council hearing. It’s a play called “No Recombination Without Representation” — a historical recreation of a pivotal moment that happened in this same room, 50 years ago, which paved the way for Cambridge to become the world’s hub of biotechnology research.
“Thank you to the students for their beautiful and sincere presentation,” said an actor portraying former Cambridge mayor Al Vellucci as he called the meeting to order.
“This public hearing, held on this June 23rd, 1976, is for the City Council and the people of Cambridge to hear testimony concerning possible construction of a special containment laboratory at Harvard College,” he said.
Vellucci had called the hearing 50 years ago to interrogate Harvard scientists about the safety of the new science of recombinant DNA research, in which DNA from one organism is placed in another.
“I have made references to Frankenstein over the past week, and some people think this is all a big joke,” Vellucci said at the hearings. “That was my way of describing what happens when genes are put together in a new way. This is a deadly serious matter.”
What followed was an unusual public process, one that experts say shaped the future of genetic research, and the city’s role in developing it.
“The story is about the dawn of genetic engineering,” science historian Luis Campos of Rice University told GBH News. “It’s the idea that different pieces of DNA could be combined in new ways that were not possible in nature, and the exciting prospects that that meant for what science could learn about the nature of heredity and and new sorts of applications and uses, but also some concern that there might be unexpected effects that might come from doing that kind of work.”
At the time, Harvard was looking for the city’s permission to build a new lab to do this kind of research. Campos says the theatrical mayor saw an opportunity.
“One of the things that Velluci was very aware of in representing his constituency was making sure that the ordinary Cantabrigian — the working-class folks that he represented — were being taken care of in city politics, and not simply that Harvard and MIT could kind of do whatever they wanted,” Campos said.
Ultimately, the city council decided to pull a classic move of elected bodies. They assigned a committee to research the issue.
“And in this case, you make a committee of citizens who are going to represent a number of views,” Campos said. “And so over the space of the next half-year, really, they worked their way through it.”
One of the city councilors at the hearing who decided to send the issue to a committee was David Clem.
“In a way, it took the issue away from Al Vellucci grandstanding or individual counselors grandstanding and neutralized it by slowing things down, having a process,” Clem recalls.
The committee spent months speaking with scientists before recommending Cambridge allow the research to move forward following new federal NIH guidelines, as well as a few additional guardrails. The Cambridge City Council accepted those recommendations.
“At the end of the day, all we did was make it impossible to do germ warfare research at a P4-level lab, and that NIH standards that were promulgated for NIH-funded research were the same standards that anybody using private funding, non-NIH funding, had to use,” Clem said.
Mayor Vellucci’s attack on the research backfired. Scientists say it’s because of this hearing 50 years ago that Cambridge became a global center for biotechnology and drug research.
One person who scored big because of that was that city councilor, David Clem. He’d go on to become one of the main real estate developers, repurposing old industrial buildings to house the biotech boom in Kendall Square.
“As my real estate career demonstrated, that became the reason Cambridge became the go-to place, because the rules were established,” Clem told GBH News.
“If these hearings hadn’t happened, the whole course of the development of New England and science in general in the area of biotechnology would be different,” said Phillip Sharp, who had been teaching at MIT for just a few years when he sat in the audience in the Cambridge City Council chambers that day, 50 years ago.
Sharp went on to win a Nobel Prize for his research using recombinant DNA.
“We have cures for disease now that we couldn’t have dreamed about without this technology and without this whole biotechnology development,” Sharp said.
Sharp said the public process made Cambridge the perfect place to locate the company he co-founded, the drug giant Biogen.
“These guidelines were in place, they were settled, and the city said, as long as you adhere to the same guidelines as the universities, you can do this research,” he said. “And that took away a lot of uncertainty.”
Among those calling for regulations on research was Jonathan King, a professor at MIT who testified about his fears that genetically altered infectious organisms could escape the lab.
“If you have a committee of people charged with protecting us from the danger, and these people are willing to get up in public and say ‘There’s absolutely no danger, there’s nothing to worry about, the facilities are super safe, the bugs won’t make you sick’ — well, that is the last person that I am willing to trust in terms of my health,” King said at the 1976 hearings.
Today, King is still critical of the safety claims of the other scientists who testified. He says they were invested in the research and didn’t want regulations to stand in the way of them making a ton of money. But he says in the end, the hearing led to meaningful regulations.
“I would have liked it to be stronger,” he says today. “But the fact of the matter is that those regulations were a step forward in terms of public health and safety and occupational health and safety. And certainly they didn’t stop our colleagues from becoming millionaires and billionaires and an enormous industry developing.”
King is among those featured as characters in the new theatrical performance of the hearing being staged in the actual Cambridge City Council Chambers.
“You know, I’ve never been the subject of an actor before,” he said. “It’s very, very odd.”
Campos helped create the play along with the MIT Museum and the Central Square Theater. And he says its themes still resonate.
“Even though we’re talking about recombinant DNA from 50 years ago, people might have AI going through their heads, people might have the pandemic going through their heads,” Campos said. “There might be other things that they’re resonating with. And I think that’s the power of art.”
As new technology emerges, he says, the question of how to make sure it’s done in a way that’s responsible to the public is as relevant now as ever.
Audio from the play “No Recombination Without Representation” was provided by the MIT Open Learning Video Team.
