Science Quote by Paul Berg

A scientist admitting that panic was "rampant" is doing more than describing a mood; Paul Berg is sketching the emotional climate that forced modern biology to grow up in public. The line lands with a deliberately sober sprawl: "new kinds of plagues", "altering human evolution", "irreversibly altering the environment". Each clause escalates from the immediate (disease) to the existential (species destiny) to the planetary (ecological permanence). It reads like a checklist of apocalypse genres, which is precisely the point: early recombinant DNA work didn t just raise technical questions, it triggered cultural anxieties that sounded like science fiction because the tools were arriving faster than the language for governing them.

Berg s intent is also defensive, but not dismissive. Calling the concerns "only some" subtly widens the frame, suggesting that critics weren t merely hysterical; there were many plausible failure modes, and responsible people were trying to map them. That choice of "rampant" carries a double edge: it acknowledges how fear can spread like a contagion, while echoing the very plague imagery he names. It is a scientist s rhetorical judo, turning the vocabulary of outbreak into a description of public reaction.

Context matters: Berg was central to the recombinant DNA debates of the 1970s and the Asilomar conference that helped establish self-imposed safety guidelines. This quote reads like a retrospective justification for cautious governance: not because scientists were anti-progress, but because they understood that a single irreversible accident could rewrite the social contract around research.