CRISPR – and the race is on (again)
July 25, 2016
At the weekend I was reading an article in the Guardian about a team of Chinese scientists trying to use CRISPR/gene editing for the treatment of cancer; and I sighed. The article contained some of the standard and, I believe, quite worn-out tropes that pepper coverage of advances in biotechnology: playing God, designer babies…, as …
Nanoscience, images and technologies of visualisation: A space odyssey
January 22, 2015
This blog post is a story about an intellectual and collaborative adventure that should be all too familiar to academics. However, opportunities for such adventures may sadly be disappearing in an era of impact driven research. It is a story of how enthusiasm, curiosity, serendipity and collaboration can lead to unexpected and joyous outcomes. At …
RRI and impact: An ‘impossiblist’ agenda for research?
November 22, 2014
Richard Jones has written a long, profound and thought-provoking blog post on (ir)responsible innovation (stagnation). I read his post alongside a recent post on the social impact of research, its challenges and opportunities. This made me think that we are witnessing a confluence of agendas which are generally only looked at separately but that should …
Responsive Research: Which Research? Whose Responsibility?
March 31, 2014
Over the past couple of months, I have been mulling over why the apparently simple idea of responsive research is so challenging. I began a policy thought-leadership project for Sciencewise-ERC aiming to investigate a key principle, namely, that research should be responsive to public needs and priorities. Admittedly, this definition of ‘responsive research’ is more …
MSP bookmarks
- Twitter May 8, 2017
- Social innovations in Europe #RRI November 3, 2015
- Harvey Graff, the undisciplinarian September 20, 2015
- Replacing Pesticides With Genetics August 31, 2015
- Addressing hazardous chemicals in the circular economy August 25, 2015
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