A one-day public symposium held on March 20, 1998 at the University of California at Los Angeles marked the effective beginning of the active campaign to promote the development and use of inheritable germline modification (IGM). The event, entitled Engineering the Human Germline, was organized by UCLA professors Gregory Stock and John Campbell.

The goal of the conference, Stock explained to Nature, was to make inheritable genetic engineering "acceptable" to the public. Nearly 1000 attendees heard James Watson, Lee Silver, W. French Anderson, former Science editor Daniel Koshland and others state that germline engineering was desirable and should be developed, and in any event was "inevitable."

Topics discussed included the state of the science and remaining technical obstacles to be overcome in order for germline modification experiments in humans to begin; the potentially large public demand for germline engineering; approaches to address the problem of informed consent; alleged advantages of germline over somatic engi eering; and the state of national and international policy concerning germline engineering.

The New York Times, the Washington Post, and other major newspapers gave the symposium extensive coverage. See http://www.ess.ucla.edu/huge/timesart.html and http://www.ess.ucla.edu/huge/Post.html.

After the symposium Gregory Stock prepared a set of policy recommendations calling on the United States to "resist any further effort by UNESCO or other international bodies to block the exploration of germline engineering" and to ask the National Institutes of Health to lift its moratorium on consideration of germline engineering proposals. Stock also stated that current US regulatory structures were adequate for overseeing proposals to begin germline engineering.

In 2000 a book based on the conference was published. In Engineering the Human Germline: An Exploration of the Science and Ethics of Altering the Genes We Pass to Our Children, (Gregory Stock and John Campbell, eds., New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), Stock and Campbell nuance the explicit advocacy that characterized their presentations at the conference itself. They acknowledge that the topic of human germline engineering is "fraught with controversy" and needs to be "carefully examined" through "widespread public debate," and they include statements from several opponents of germline engineering. But most of the text presents germline engineering in a sympathetic manner.

In April, 2002, Stock published another book, Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future in which he developed further his vision of a world of genetically enhanced humans.