It’s considered a scientific landmark: A 1975 meeting at the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California, shaped a new safety regime for recombinant DNA, ensuring that researchers would apply caution to gene splicing. Those ideas have been so useful that in the decades since, when new topics in scientific safety arise, there are still calls for Asilomar-type conferences to craft good ground rules.

There’s something missing from this narrative, though: It took more than the Asilomar conference to set today’s standards. The Asilomar concepts were created with academic research in mind — but the biotechnology industry also makes products, and standards for that were formulated after Asilomar.

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