Interviewee: Paul Berg. Paul Berg talks about why experiments with recombinant DNA set off a firestorm of controversy, including a moratorium on further experimentation with rDNA. (DNAi Location: Manipulation > Revolution > Players > Paul Berg > A jolt to the scientific community)

You could take a colony and put it into a hundred gallon vat and the bacteria would grow up and fill up the vat, and every cell in that vat would contain the piece of DNA that the original bacterium picked up when you mixed them with the DNA. So that showed you could clone DNA, and I think that experiment is what galvanized the scientific community. It is in fact the experiment that motivated the moratorium letter, because it became clear you could put any kind of DNA into that plasmid and get it into a bacterium, and so you could put toxin genes, you could put drug-resistant genes, any kind of DNA you had access to could be put into a plasmid, put into a bacterium and cloned.

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