"Paradoxically, no such embargo exists for the drugs and therapies that have revolutionized the treatment of serious diseases although many of them were created with the same technologies"
About this Quote
Berg’s “paradoxically” is doing real work: it’s not a mild throat-clear, it’s an indictment. He’s pointing at a cultural double standard that hardened in the late 20th century as biotechnology split into “healing” and “threatening” in the public imagination. Recombinant DNA and adjacent tools could be framed as either medical salvation or ecological vandalism; policy often chose a convenient moral sorting system rather than a coherent risk framework.
The line’s intent is to puncture that sorting. An “embargo” isn’t a scientific term, it’s a political one - evoking the blunt instrument of prohibition and the optics of safety-by-ban. Berg, who helped catalyze the Asilomar conference on recombinant DNA and then watched biotech mature into life-saving pharmaceuticals, is calling out how fear attaches to outcomes (genetically modified crops, edited organisms released into the world) while admiration attaches to benefits (insulin, biologics, gene-based therapies) even when the underlying methods overlap.
Subtext: our regulatory reflexes track narrative, not technology. Therapies feel contained - administered by experts, inside clinics, with individual consent. Agricultural and environmental applications feel diffuse, harder to recall, and politically entangled with corporations, land, and food. Berg’s sentence compresses that whole asymmetry into a single “although,” forcing readers to confront the uncomfortable continuity: you can’t celebrate the tools in hospitals and condemn the tools in fields without admitting the real argument is about trust, power, and where uncertainty is allowed to live.
Contextually, it’s a scientist’s plea for consistency - not for no regulation, but for regulation that admits what it’s actually judging.
The line’s intent is to puncture that sorting. An “embargo” isn’t a scientific term, it’s a political one - evoking the blunt instrument of prohibition and the optics of safety-by-ban. Berg, who helped catalyze the Asilomar conference on recombinant DNA and then watched biotech mature into life-saving pharmaceuticals, is calling out how fear attaches to outcomes (genetically modified crops, edited organisms released into the world) while admiration attaches to benefits (insulin, biologics, gene-based therapies) even when the underlying methods overlap.
Subtext: our regulatory reflexes track narrative, not technology. Therapies feel contained - administered by experts, inside clinics, with individual consent. Agricultural and environmental applications feel diffuse, harder to recall, and politically entangled with corporations, land, and food. Berg’s sentence compresses that whole asymmetry into a single “although,” forcing readers to confront the uncomfortable continuity: you can’t celebrate the tools in hospitals and condemn the tools in fields without admitting the real argument is about trust, power, and where uncertainty is allowed to live.
Contextually, it’s a scientist’s plea for consistency - not for no regulation, but for regulation that admits what it’s actually judging.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
|---|
More Quotes by Paul
Add to List
