Abstract: The California meeting set standards allowing geneticists to push research to its limits without endangering public health. Organizer Paul Berg asks if another such meeting could resolve today's controversies. The International Congress on Recombinant DNA Molecules, held in 1975 at the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California, broke new ground. In a poacher-turned-gamekeeper sort of a way. At Asilomar the scientists in the vanguard of genetic engineering research brought the public's attention to the potential dangers of their work, but at the same time they established a set of stringent guidelines to ensure public safety. Paul Berg, who — with David Baltimore, Sydney Brenner, Richard Roblin and Maxine Singer — drew up the conference agenda, looks back at the Asilomar meeting and asks and answers the question whether the same technique could help solve some of today's controversies.