Next year will mark the twentieth anniversary of the publication of GeneWatch. As a lead-in to this exciting date, we are inaugurating a new series which will look back on the articles from the first few issues of GeneWatch. Throughout 2002, we will republish an original article along with updates and commentary explaining what has and hasn’t changed over the past twenty years, to mark how far we’ve come or illustrate how much work still needs to be done.

Surprisingly, many of the articles in the very first issue of GeneWatch, November/December 1983, are quite similar to stories covered in the past year. Titles in the 1983 issue included “Genetic Screening in the Workplace” (the subject of one of the panels at the CRG November conference, and a CRG program area); “Biological Weapons,” (a subject currently in the news every day, and topic of the upcoming Special Issue in March; also covered recently in GeneWatch 14:3 “Plum Island: Biowarfare Laboratory?” and GeneWatch 14:6 “Biowarfare and the Department of Energy”); “Seeds and Biotechnology,” (another CRG program area, and covered in GeneWatch 14:4 “The Safe Seed Pledge: A Move Towards Food Protection” and GeneWatch 14:6 “Genetically Engineered Thanksgiving: Uninvited DNA Comes to Dinner”). For many people, these topics are today’s news. For CRG, they’re ongoing areas of interest—both today’s news and yesterday’s discussion.

Another topic from the 1983 issue which is still relevant today is the potential for rapid stress-driven gene transfer in sewage. At the CRG conference in November, Martha Herbert, Abby Rockefeller, Michael Hansen, and Sheldon Rampton led a workshop entitled “Is the Sewage Sludge Industry Spreading an Ideal Medium for Gene Transfer and New Diseases?” Abby Rockefeller and CRG board member Martha Herbert have provided an update on the status of this issue today.