Social, cultural and ethical aspects of synthetic biology: A scientist’s perspective
January 12, 2018
When you go to the website of the Dymond Research Group at the University of Brighton, you see article titles like this “Lipid Spontaneous Curvatures Estimated from Temperature-Dependent Changes in Inverse Hexagonal Phase Lattice Parameters: Effects of Metal Cations”. That probably means something to experts in the field. It doesn’t mean a lot to me. …
Bacteria, scientists and stewardship
July 7, 2017
Bacteria have fascinated scientists for centuries and still do. One of the first to see bacteria under the microscope was “probably the Dutch naturalist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who in 1683 described some animalcules, as they were then called, in water, saliva, and other substances” (Encyclopaedia Britannica). A modern understanding of bacteria developed in the 19th century. Ferdinand …
CRISPR, unicorns and responsible language use
June 23, 2017
I was looking through my twitter timeline on 12 June, when I came cross a tweet by Dietram Scheufele which said “’bend nature to our will.’ #CRISPR frame in new #Doudna book might resonate differently across audiences […] #scicomm”. The tweet made reference to an article by Sharon Begley in STAT News about Jennifer Doudna’s new book, co-authored with Samuel Sternberg, A …
SBRC symposium: Synbio, metaphors and responsibility
May 26, 2017
On Monday this week (22 May, 2017) our Synthetic Biology Research Centre symposium on metaphors, synthetic biology and responsibility took place at the East Midlands Conference Centre at the University of Nottingham. The weather was marvellous and showed off University Park in all is spring glory. We started with a pre-conference dinner which, in a way, …
Responsibility and openness
February 10, 2017
Hilary Sutcliffe (RRI specialist) recently made me aware of an article by Arie Rip published in the Journal of Responsible Innovation. At the time of our twitter exchange the article was not openly available, so Stephen Curry (Open access specialist) sent me a copy. The article is entitled ‘The clothes of the emperor. An essay …
Making Science Public: 2016 blog round-up
December 19, 2016
This has been a weird and momentous year. For me personally and, even more so, for the world. In June this year we celebrated the almost end of the Making Science Public programme, which I directed between 2012 and 2016. At the end of September I retired, after working for more than 25 years at the University …
Meanings of RRI: The missing link between theory and practice
November 21, 2016
This is a guest post by Alasdair Taylor, Industry Programme Manager at The Royal Society, formerly a research chemist at the University of Nottingham. This blog post is based on the author’s article (co-authored with Sarah Hartley and Warren Pearce), ‘Against the tide of depoliticisation: The politics of research governance’, published open access in Policy & Politics. …
Responsible research and innovation in the UK university: the politics of research governance
November 17, 2016
This article by Sarah Hartley and Warren Pearce was first published on the LSE Impact Blog on 14 November, 2016 and is republished here under a CC BY 3.0 licence. *** What is science for? One answer to this might be “to answer questions about how the world works”. Sounds simple, but packed into these eight words are …
Synthetic Biology and Responsible Language Use: An anthology of blog posts
April 11, 2016
Over the last couple of years I have written quite a few blog posts on synthetic biology and responsible research and innovation, focusing in particular on the use of metaphors in both science and policy/politics. I have now assembled them, DIY fashion, into a little ‘booklet’. If anybody has the time and/or inclination to do …
Science, politics and magic
April 10, 2016
A couple of years ago, prompted by an article by Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, I wrote a blog post about ‘responsible innovation’ as a buzzword. About a year ago, I tried to understand the appeal of another buzzword, namely ‘co-production’. Yesterday, I cleared out some files and happened to come across some thirty-year-old notes on the magical …
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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