Little previous research has examined attitudes about societal and ethical issues (SEI) among interns participating in research experience for undergraduate programs (REUs) in nanotechnology, thus neglecting an important population for understanding the burgeoning views of the next generation of nanotechnology researchers. This study surveyed a sample of interns (N = 85) participating in the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network’s (NNIN) REU program during the summer of 2012. Our questions focused on interns’ experiences with education on ethical issues, as well as their (...) attribution of responsibility for considering ethical issues, motivations to talk about ethical issues, and comfort level of discussing ethical issues with faculty, mentors, lab staff, and other REU students. Among key findings was that lab culture related to the extent to which REU interns felt comfortable discussing ethical issues. In addition, those who reported more discussions about ethical issues with their mentors were more likely to consider themselves as responsible for considering ethical issues. We conclude with recommendations and future research directions. (shrink)

The field of nanoscience and nanotechnology is expanding rapidly, promising great benefits for society in the form of better medicine, more efficient energy production, new types of materials, etc. Naturally, in order for the science and technology to live up to these promises, it is important to continue scientific research and development, but equally important is the ethical dimension. Giving attention to the social, ethical and legal aspects of the field, among others, will help in developing a fully responsible—and thereby (...) capable—science and technology. Nanoethics has emerged as a field concerned with such ethical issues related to nanoscience and nanotechnology. Even though this field is relatively new, a significant amount of literature has already been published. This paper focuses on three of the major issues which are discussed in the literature of nanoethics, and also points to a certain bias in this literature. Each quite different in nature, these issues are: (1) The naming and (2) the timing of and approach to the field, as well as (3) the issue of safety. As will be seen, these issues are almost exclusively discussed by ethicists, (throughout the article, the term’ethicist’ is used in a broad definition covering philosophers, social and political scientists as well as philosophers of science) thus having no direct influence on the work being carried out by scientists. One can argue, therefore, that this bias creates a distortion of the ethical debate, making it insufficient and misleading. Ultimately, this bias is caused by the lack of communication and collaboration between ethicists on the one hand, and nanoscientists on the other. Thus, an argument is made for the different disciplines to begin collaborating, so as to more effectively and responsibly develop the field of nanoscience. (shrink)

In response to an increasing amount of policy papers stressing the need for integrating social and ethical aspects in Research and Development (R&D) practices, science studies scholars have conducted integrative research and experiments with science and innovation actors. One widely employed integration method is Midstream Modulation (MM), in which an ‘embedded humanist’ interacts in regular meetings with researchers to engage them with the social and ethical aspects of their work. While the possibility of using MM to enhance critical reflection has (...) been demonstrated in academic settings, few attempts have been made to examine its appropriateness in industry. This paper describes the outcomes of a case study aiming to find out firstly whether MM can effectively be deployed to encourage and facilitate researchers to actively include social and ethical aspects in their daily R&D practice, and secondly to what extent the integration activities could form an integral part of the engaged industrial researchers’ professional activities. Our data show that after MM, researchers display increased reflexive awareness on the social and ethical aspects of their work and acknowledge the relevance and utility of such aspects on their daily practice. Also, all participants considered actively reflecting on social and ethical aspects to be part of their work. Future research on the role of MM in industrial settings could focus on how to embed social and ethical integration as a regular part of innovation practice. We suggest that one possibility would be through aligning social and ethical aspects with innovation Key Performance Indicators. (shrink)

The societal and ethical impacts of emerging technological and business systems cannot entirely be foreseen; therefore, management of these innovations will require at least some ethicists to work closely with researchers. This is particularly critical in the development of new systems because the maximum degrees of freedom for changing technological direction occurs at or just after the point of breakthrough; that is also the point where the long-term implications are hardest to visualize. Recent work on shared expertise in Science & (...) Technology Studies (STS) can help create productive collaborations among scientists, engineers, ethicists and other stakeholders as these new systems are designed and implemented. But collaboration across these disciplines will be successful only if scientists, engineers, and ethicists can communicate meaningfully with each other. The establishment of a trading zone coupled with moral imagination present one method for such collaborative communication. (shrink)

The societal and ethical impacts of emerging technological and business systems cannot entirely be foreseen; therefore, management of these innovations will require at least some ethicists to work closely with researchers. This is particularly critical in the development of new systems because the maximum degrees of freedom for changing technological direction occurs at or just after the point of breakthrough; that is also the point where the long-term implications are hardest to visualize. Recent work on shared expertise in Science & (...) Technology Studies (STS) can help create productive collaborations among scientists, engineers, ethicists and other stakeholders as these new systems are designed and implemented. But collaboration across these disciplines will be successful only if scientists, engineers, and ethicists can communicate meaningfully with each other. The establishment of a trading zone coupled with moral imagination present one method for such collaborative communication. (shrink)

Traditionally, the management of technology has focused on the stages before or after development of technology. In this approach the technology itself is conceived as the result of a deterministic enterprise; a result that is to be either rejected or embraced. However, recent insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS) have shown that there is ample room to modulate technology during development. This requires technology managers and engineering ethicists to become more involved in the technological research rather than assessing it (...) from an outsider perspective. Instead of focusing on the question whether or not to authorize, approve, or adopt a certain technology or on the question of who is to blame for potential mistakes, the guiding question in this new approach is how research is to be carried out. (shrink)

There is a growing literature on how scientific experts understand risk of technology related to their disciplinary field. Previous research shows that experts have different understandings and perspectives depending on disciplinary culture, organizational affiliation, and how they more broadly look upon their role in society. From a practice-based perspective on risk management as a bottom-up activity embedded in work place routines and everyday interactions, we look, through an ethnographic lens, at the laboratory life of nanoscientists. In the USA and Sweden, (...) two categories of nanoscientists have been studied: upstream scientists who are mainly electrical and physical engineers and downstream scientists who are toxicologists, often with a more multidisciplinary background, including physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering. The results show that although the two groups of scientists share the same norms of appropriate laboratory conduct to promote safety and good science practice, they have very different perspectives on risk with nanomaterials. Upstream scientists downplay risk; they emphasize the innovative potential of the new materials to which they express an affectionate and personalized stance. The downstream scientists, instead, focus on the uncertainties and unpredictability of nanomaterials and they see some materials as potentially highly dangerous. The results highlight the ambiguous and complex role of scientific experts in policy processes about the risk and regulation of nanotechnology. (shrink)

The assessment of nanotechnology applications such as nanocarrier-based targeted drug delivery has historically been based mostly on toxicological and safety aspects. The use of nanocarriers for TDD, a leading-edge nanomedical application, has received little study from the angle of experts’ perceptions and acceptability, which may be reflected in how TDD applications are developed. In recent years, numerous authors have maintained that TDD assessment should also take into account impacts on ethical, environmental, economic, legal, and social issues in order to lead (...) to socially responsible innovation. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with French and Canadian researchers and research trainees with diverse disciplinary backgrounds and involved in research related to emerging technologies. The interviews focussed on scenarios presenting two types of TDD nanocarriers in two contexts of use. Content and inductive analyses of interviews showed how facets of perceived impacts such as health, environment, social cohabitation, economy, life and death, representations of the human being and nature, and technoscience were weighed in acceptability judgments. The analyses also revealed that contextual factors related to device, to use, and to user influenced the weighting assigned to perceived impacts and thus contributed to variability in interviewees’ judgments of acceptability. Giving consideration to researchers’ perspective could accompany first steps of implementation and development of nanomedicine by producing a first, but wide, picture of the acceptability of nanocarrier-based TDD. (shrink)

Contemporary literature investigating the significant impact of technology on our lives leads many to conclude that ethics must be a part of the discussion at an earlier stage in the design process i.e., before a commercial product is developed and introduced. The problem, however, is the question regarding how ethics can be incorporated into an earlier stage of technological development and it is this question that we argue has not yet been answered adequately. There is no consensus amongst scholars as (...) to the kind of ethics that should be practiced, nor the individual selected to perform this ethical analysis. One school of thought holds that ethics should have pragmatic value in research and design and that it should be implemented by the engineers and/or scientists themselves, while another school of thought holds that ethics need not be so pragmatic. For the latter, the ethical reflection can aim at a variety of goals, and be carried out by an ethicist. None of the approaches resulting from these lines of thinking have been adopted on a wide-scale basis. To that end, the approach presented here is intended to bridge the gap between these schools of thought. It is our contention that ethics ought to be pragmatic and to provide utility for the design process and we maintain that adequate ethical reflection, and all that it entails, ought to be conducted by an ethicist. Thus, we propose a novel role for the ethicist—the ethicist as designer—who subscribes to a pragmatic view of ethics in order to bring ethics into the research and design of artifacts—no matter the stage of development. In this paper we outline the series of steps that a pragmatic value analysis entails: uncovering relevant values, scrutinizing these values and, working towards the translation of values into technical content. In conclusion, we present a list of tasks for the ethicist in his/her role as designer on the interdisciplinary team. (shrink)

This paper presents and evaluates two advanced courses organised in Oxford as part of the European project Nanobio-RAISE and suggests using their format to encourage multidisciplinary engagement between nanoscientists and nanoethicists. Several nanoethicists have recently identified the need for ‘better’ ethics of emerging technologies, arguing that ethical reflection should become part and parcel of the research and development (R&D) process itself. Such new forms of ethical deliberation, it is argued, transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries and require the active engagement and involvement (...) of both nanoethicists and nanoscientists with the broader issues surrounding technological developments. Whereas significant research efforts into multi- and interdisciplinary collaborations during R&D processes are now emerging, opportunities for encouraging multidisciplinary engagement through education have remained relatively underexplored. This paper argues that educational programmes could be a natural extension of ongoing collaborative research efforts ‘in the lab’ and analyses how the Nanobio-RAISE courses could be used as a model for course development. In addition to exploring how the elements that were conducive to multidisciplinary engagement in this course could be preserved in future courses, this paper suggests shifting the emphasis from public communication towards ethical deliberation. Further course work could thus build capacity among both nanoscientists and nanoethicists for doing ‘better’ nanoethics. (shrink)

New and Emerging Science and Technology (NEST) based innovations, e.g. in the field of Life Sciences or Nanotechnology, frequently raise societal and political concerns. To address these concerns NEST researchers are expected to deploy socially responsible R&D practices. This requires researchers to integrate social and ethical aspects (SEAs) in their daily work. Many methods can facilitate such integration. Still, why and how researchers should and could use SEAs remains largely unclear. In this paper we aim to relate motivations for NEST (...) researchers to include SEAs in their work, and the requirements to establish such integration from their perspectives, to existing approaches that can be used to establish integration of SEAs in the daily work of these NEST researchers. Based on our analyses, we argue that for the successful integration of SEAs in R&D practice, collaborative approaches between researchers and scholars from the social sciences and humanities seem the most successful. The only way to explore whether that is in fact the case, is by embarking on collaborative research endeavours. (shrink)

The integration of nanotechnology’s ‘social and ethical issues’ (SEI) at the research and development stage is one of the defining features of nanotechnology governance in the United States. Mandated by law, integration extends the field of nanotechnology to include a role for the “social”, the “public” and the social sciences and humanities in research and development (R&D) practices and agendas. Drawing from interviews with scientists, engineers and policymakers who took part in an oral history of the “Future of Nanotechnology” symposium (...) at the Cornell NanoScale Facility, this article examines how nanotechnology’s ‘social and ethical issues’ are brought to life by these practitioners. From our analysis, three modes of enactment emerge: enacting SEI as obligations and problems-to-be-solved, enacting SEI by ‘not doing it’ in the laboratory, and enacting SEI as part of scientific practice. Together they paint a complex picture where SEI are variously defined, made visible or invisible, included and excluded, with participants showing their skill at both boundary-work (Gieryn Am Sociol Rev 48:781–795, 1983, 1999) and at integration. We conclude by reflecting on what this may mean for the design and implementation of SEI integration policies, suggesting that we need to transform SEI from obligations into ‘matters of care’ (Puig de la Bellacasa Soc Stud Sci 41(1):85–106, 2011) that tend to existing relationalities between science and society and implicate practitioners themselves. (shrink)

To put frameworks of Responsible Innovation and Responsible Research and Innovation (R(R)I) into practice, engagement methods have been developed to study and enhance technoscientific experts’ capacities to reflexively address value considerations in their work. These methods commonly rely on engagement between technoscientific experts and social scholars, which makes them vulnerable to structural barriers to interdisciplinary collaboration. To circumvent these barriers, we adapt Socio-Technical Integration Research (STIR) for broader use within technoscientific communities. We call this adaptation: reflexive practitioner dialogues. While the (...) primary aim of this article is to introduce and explain the methodological adaptation, we also analyze results from a pilot study with participants who are involved in research on contemplative practices such as mindfulness meditation. The analysis is guided by research questions that sought to assess whether and under what conditions the practitioner dialogues support reflexive and practical engagement with value considerations in participants’ work. The results indicate that reflexive practitioner dialogues can stimulate reflexive awareness of value conflicts and help re-direct decision-making responsively. We characterize the conditions facilitating such responsiveness as “value exnovators,” highlighting the oft-unacknowledged interpersonal relational practices that support collaborative engagement with value considerations. We suggest that “exnovation”—exposing the strengths of given practices for their improvement—can support R(R)I practices by directing analytical attention to their micro-level carriers. (shrink)

The US National Institute of Health’s Human Microbiome Project aims to use genomic techniques to understand the microbial communities that live on the human body. The emergent field of microbiome science brought together diverse disciplinary perspectives and technologies, thus facilitating the negotiation of differing values. Here, we describe how values are conceptualized and negotiated within microbiome research. Analyzing discussions from a series of interdisciplinary workshops conducted with microbiome researchers, we argue that negotiations of epistemic, social, and institutional values were inextricable (...) from the reflective and strategic category work that defined and organized the microbiome as an object of study and a potential future site of biomedical intervention. Negotiating the divergence or tension between emerging scientific and regulatory classifications also activated “values levers” and opened up reflective discussions of how classifications embody values and how these values might differ across domains. These data suggest that scholars at the intersections of science and technology studies, ethics, and policy could leverage such openings to identify and intervene in the ways that ethical/regulatory and scientific/technical practices are coproduced within unfolding research. (shrink)

Responsible research and innovation has come to represent a change in the relationship between science, technology and society. With origins in the democratisation of science, and the inclusion of ethical and societal aspects in research and development activities, RRI offers a means of integrating society and the research and innovation communities. In this article, we frame RRI activities through the lens of layers of science and technology governance as a means of characterising the context in which the RRI activity is (...) positioned and the goal of those actors promoting the RRI activities in shaping overall governance patterns. RRI began to emerge during a time of considerable deliberation about the societal and governance challenges around nanotechnology, in which stakeholders were looking for new ways of integrating notions of responsibility in nanotechnology research and development. For this reason, this article focuses on nanotechnology as the site for exploring the evolution and growth of RRI. (shrink)

Science policy mandates across the industrialized world insinuate more active roles for publics, their earlier participation in policy decisions, and expanded notions of science and technology governance. In response to these policies, engaged scholars in science studies have sought to design and conduct exercises aimed at better attuning science to its public contexts. As demand increases for innovative and potentially democratic forms of public engagement with science and technology, so also do the prospects for insights from science studies to contribute (...) to policy agendas and institutional capabilities. This collection brings together an international set of scholars in science, technology and society who inquire into the meaning, efficacy and responsibility of engaged science studies scholarship as a public matter. (shrink)

The technical details of Internet architecture affect social debates about privacy and autonomy, intellectual property, cybersecurity, and the basic performance and reliability of Internet services. This paper explores one method for practicing anticipatory ethics in order to understand how a new infrastructure for the Internet might impact these social debates. This paper systematically examines values expressed by an Internet architecture engineering team—the Named Data Networking project—based on data gathered from publications and internal documents. Networking engineers making technical choices also weigh (...) non-technical values when working on Internet infrastructure. Analysis of the team’s documents reveals both values invoked in response to technical constraints and possibilities, such as efficiency and dynamism, as well as values, including privacy, security and anonymity, which stem from a concern for personal liberties. More peripheral communitarian values espoused by the engineers include democratization and trust. The paper considers the contextual and social origins of these values, and then uses them as a method of practicing anticipatory ethics: considering the impact such priorities may have on a future Internet. (shrink)

In response to an increasing amount of policy papers stressing the need for integrating social and ethical aspects in Research and Development (R&D) practices, science studies scholars have conducted integrative research and experiments with science and innovation actors. One widely employed integration method is Midstream Modulation (MM), in which an ‘embedded humanist’ interacts in regular meetings with researchers to engage them with the social and ethical aspects of their work. While the possibility of using MM to enhance critical reflection has (...) been demonstrated in academic settings, few attempts have been made to examine its appropriateness in industry. This paper describes the outcomes of a case study aiming to find out firstly whether MM can effectively be deployed to encourage and facilitate researchers to actively include social and ethical aspects in their daily R&D practice, and secondly to what extent the integration activities could form an integral part of the engaged industrial researchers’ professional activities. Our data show that after MM, researchers display increased reflexive awareness on the social and ethical aspects of their work and acknowledge the relevance and utility of such aspects on their daily practice. Also, all participants considered actively reflecting on social and ethical aspects to be part of their work. Future research on the role of MM in industrial settings could focus on how to embed social and ethical integration as a regular part of innovation practice. We suggest that one possibility would be through aligning social and ethical aspects with innovation Key Performance Indicators. (shrink)

The governance of nanotechnology seeks to limit its risks, without constraining opportunities. The literature on the effectiveness of approaches to governance has neglected approaches that impact directly on the behavior of a researcher. We analyze the effectiveness of legal regulations versus regulation via self-commitment. Then, we refine this model by analyzing competition and autonomy as key contingency factors. In the first step, qualitative interviews with nanotechnology researchers are conducted to reflect this model. In the second step, its empirical relevance is (...) tested using a survey of 90 nanotech researchers. The results indicate that legal regulations, as well as self-commitment to an informal CoC reduce the scope of behavior. Finally, that competition and autonomy affect the relative strength of these governance factors. (shrink)

In response to widespread policy prescriptions for responsible innovation, social scientists and engineering ethicists, among others, have sought to engage natural scientists and engineers at the ‘midstream’: building interdisciplinary collaborations to integrate social and ethical considerations with research and development processes. Two ‘laboratory engagement studies’ have explored how applying the framework of midstream modulation could enhance the reflections of natural scientists on the socio-ethical context of their work. The results of these interdisciplinary collaborations confirm the utility of midstream modulation in (...) encouraging both first- and second-order reflective learning. The potential for second-order reflective learning, in which underlying value systems become the object of reflection, is particularly significant with respect to addressing social responsibility in research practices. Midstream modulation served to render the socio-ethical context of research visible in the laboratory and helped enable research participants to more critically reflect on this broader context. While lab-based collaborations would benefit from being carried out in concert with activities at institutional and policy levels, midstream modulation could prove a valuable asset in the toolbox of interdisciplinary methods aimed at responsible innovation. (shrink)

Discourses on Responsible Innovation and Responsible Research and Innovation, in short RI, have revolved around but not elaborated on the notion of critique. In this article, generative critique is introduced to RI as a practice that sits in-between adversarial armchair critique and co-opted, uncritical service. How to position oneself and be positioned on this spectrum has puzzled humanities scholars and social scientists who engage in interdisciplinary collaborations with scientists, engineers, and other professionals. Recently, generative critique has been presented as a (...) solution to the puzzle in interdisciplinary collaborations on neuroscientific experiments. Generative critique seeks to create connections across disciplines that help remake seemingly stable objects in moments when taken-for-granted ways of seeing and approaching objects are unsettled. In order to translate generative critique from the neurosciences to RI, socio-technical integration research is proposed as a practice of generative critique in interdisciplinary RI collaborations. These collaborations aim to account for societal aspects in research and technology development. For this purpose, a variety of approaches have been developed, including STIR and video-reflexive ethnography. STIR and VRE resemble each other but diverge on affective, collaborative, and temporal dimensions. Their juxtaposition serves to develop suggestions for how STIR could be modified on these dimensions to better enact generative critique in interdisciplinary RI collaborations. In this way, the article contributes to ongoing discussions in RI and in the engaged programme in science and technology studies more broadly on the dynamics of positioning in collaborative work. (shrink)

Scholars studying the ethical, legal, and social issues associated with emerging technologies maintain the importance of considering these issues throughout the research and development cycle, even during the earliest stages of basic research. Embedding these considerations within the scientific process requires communication between ELSI scholars and the community of physical scientists who are conducting that basic research. We posit that this communication can be effective on a broad scale only if it links societal issues directly to characteristics of the emerging (...) technology that are relevant to the physical and natural scientists involved in research and development. In this article, we examine nano-ELSI literature from 2003 to 2010 to discern the degree to which it makes these types of explicit connections. We find that, while the literature identifies a wide range of issues of societal concern, it generally does so in a non-specific manner. It neither links societal issues to particular forms or characteristics of widely divergent nanotechnologies nor to any of the many potential uses to which those nanotechnologies may be put. We believe that these kinds of specificity are essential to those engaged in nano-scale research. We also compare the literature-based findings to observations from interviews we conducted with nanoscientists and conclude that ELSI scholars should add technical- and application-related forms of specificity to their work and their writings to enhance effectiveness and impact in communicating with one important target audience—members of the nanoscale science community. (shrink)

New and Emerging Science and Technology (NEST) based innovations, e.g. in the field of Life Sciences or Nanotechnology, frequently raise societal and political concerns. To address these concerns NEST researchers are expected to deploy socially responsible R&D practices. This requires researchers to integrate social and ethical aspects (SEAs) in their daily work. Many methods can facilitate such integration. Still, why and how researchers should and could use SEAs remains largely unclear. In this paper we aim to relate motivations for NEST (...) researchers to include SEAs in their work, and the requirements to establish such integration from their perspectives, to existing approaches that can be used to establish integration of SEAs in the daily work of these NEST researchers. Based on our analyses, we argue that for the successful integration of SEAs in R&D practice, collaborative approaches between researchers and scholars from the social sciences and humanities seem the most successful. The only way to explore whether that is in fact the case, is by embarking on collaborative research endeavours. (shrink)

Science policy mandates across the industrialized world insinuate more active roles for publics, their earlier participation in policy decisions, and expanded notions of science and technology governance. In response to these policies, engaged scholars in science studies have sought to design and conduct exercises aimed at better attuning science to its public contexts. As demand increases for innovative and potentially democratic forms of public engagement with science and technology, so also do the prospects for insights from science studies to contribute (...) to policy agendas and institutional capabilities. This collection brings together an international set of scholars in science, technology and society who inquire into the meaning, efficacy and responsibility of engaged science studies scholarship as a public matter. (shrink)

This commentary builds on Haico te Kulve and Arie Rip’s ( 2011 ) notion of “engagement agents,” individuals that must be able to move between multiple dimensions, or “levels” of research, innovation, and policy processes. The commentary compares and contrasts the role of the engagement agent within the Constructive Technology Assessment and integration approaches, and suggests that on-site integration research represents one way to transform both social and natural scientists into competent and informed “engagement agents,” a new generation of researchers (...) that possess the knowledge and capacities to forge “novel linkages” between the oftentimes disparate terrains of science, politics, and policy. (shrink)

Ethicists and others who study and teach the social implications of science and technology are faced with a formidable challenge when they seek to address “emerging technologies.” The topic is incredibly important, but difficult to grasp because not only are the precise issues often unclear, what the technology will ultimately look like can be difficult to discern. This paper argues that one particularly useful way to overcome these difficulties is to engage with their natural science and engineering colleagues in laboratories. (...) Through discussions and interactions with these colleagues ethicists can simultaneously achieve three important objectives. First they can get a great deal of assistance in their research into the social implications of future technologies by talking with people that are actively creating those futures. Second their presence in the lab and the discussions that result can be a very powerful method for educating not only students, but faculty about the ramifications of their work. And third, because the education is directly linked to the students’ everyday work it is likely that it will not just be a theoretical exercise, but have direct impact on their practice. (shrink)

The field of nanotechnology and nanoscience is growing rapidly in many areas of research, from electronics to biomedicine to material science. Carbon nanotubes are receiving a lot of attention in the research due to their unique properties and many possible applications. This new material is a good example of how nanotechnology provides us with new opportunities, but at the same time leaves us a lot of unknowns to deal with. In order to deal with the unknowns we need to consider (...) both the science and the ethics of the different applications of this novel material. Nanoethics is the study of the ethical issues in nanotechnology. It is a relatively new field of study and a lot of different methods have been suggested in this area. In this article a method is suggested combining an existing ethical theory with a practical approach in order to do a case study of the ethical considerations of using carbon nanotubes in biomedicine. For the case study to be of practical significance the scientific characteristics and properties of carbon nanotubes are reviewed to give the reader an overview of the research field. (shrink)

This paper presents and evaluates two advanced courses organised in Oxford as part of the European project Nanobio-RAISE and suggests using their format to encourage multidisciplinary engagement between nanoscientists and nanoethicists. Several nanoethicists have recently identified the need for ‘better’ ethics of emerging technologies, arguing that ethical reflection should become part and parcel of the research and development (R&D) process itself. Such new forms of ethical deliberation, it is argued, transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries and require the active engagement and involvement (...) of both nanoethicists and nanoscientists with the broader issues surrounding technological developments. Whereas significant research efforts into multi- and interdisciplinary collaborations during R&D processes are now emerging, opportunities for encouraging multidisciplinary engagement through education have remained relatively underexplored. This paper argues that educational programmes could be a natural extension of ongoing collaborative research efforts ‘in the lab’ and analyses how the Nanobio-RAISE courses could be used as a model for course development. In addition to exploring how the elements that were conducive to multidisciplinary engagement in this course could be preserved in future courses, this paper suggests shifting the emphasis from public communication towards ethical deliberation. Further course work could thus build capacity among both nanoscientists and nanoethicists for doing ‘better’ nanoethics. (shrink)

Over the last 300 years science has been quite successful at revealing the nature of physical reality. In so doing it has provided an epistemological basis for scientific discovery and technological innovation. But science has been decidedly less successful at guiding political debate. How do we conceive of the science-society relation in the 21st century? How does scientific research hook onto the world in a multi-faceted, pluralistic, and global age? This essay seeks to reframe our thinking about the broader impacts (...) of science by awakening an appreciation of the inescapably political and dimension of all knowledge, scientific or otherwise. (shrink)

Taking up the notion of engineering as social experimentation, this paper argues that engineering research laboratory directors have a responsibility to inform graduate engineering students who participate in their research projects of the potential broader social dimensions of those projects. Informing engineers-in-the-making of the broader social dimensions of the research they are learning to conduct would help ensure their future capacity to act as ethically responsible social experimenters. The paper also argues that graduate engineers have a right to be informed (...) participants in activities that may have broader social dimensions than are recognized by formal research evaluation or educational processes. The process of obtaining the informed consent of graduate engineering students, if implemented effectively, would thus help ensure both their capacity to act as moral agents and their own moral integrity. Since the eventual outcomes of research can be uncertain, complex, and contested, most traditional institutional frameworks—such as principle-based codes of conduct and risk-benefit frameworks—provide an insufficient basis to inform engineers and citizens. Rather, we recommend an ongoing discursive process that explores a number of different actors, contexts, and scenarios, and that evolves with the social context of the engineering research in question. While this may seem burdensome to the engineering research process, it can be integrated directly into the group research meetings and mentorship activities that typically already go on. Moreover, it can actually be seen to benefit engineering practices. (shrink)

Biobased production has been promoted as a sustainable alternative to fossil resources. However, controversies over its impact on sustainability highlight societal concerns, value tensions and uncertainties that have not been taken into account during its development. In this work, the consideration of stakeholders’ values in a biorefinery design project is investigated. Value sensitive design is a promising approach to the design of technologies with consideration of stakeholders’ values, however, it is not directly applicable for complex systems like biorefineries. Therefore, some (...) elements of VSD, such as the identification of relevant values and their connection to a technology’s features, are brought into biorefinery design practice. Midstream modulation, an approach to promoting the consideration of societal aspects during research and development activities, is applied to promote reflection and value considerations during the design decision making. As result, it is shown that MM interventions during the design process led to new design alternatives in support of stakeholders' values, and allowed to recognize and respond to emerging value tensions within the scope of the project. In this way, the present work shows a novel approach for the technical investigation of VSD, especially for biorefineries. Also, based on this work it is argued that not only reflection, but also flexibility and openness are important for the application of VSD in the context of biorefinery design. (shrink)

Social studies of interdisciplinary science investigate how scientific collaborations approach complex challenges that require multiple disciplinary perspectives. In order for collaborators to meet these complex challenges, interdisciplinary collaborations must develop and maintain integrative capacity, understood as the ability to anticipate and weigh tradeoffs in the employment of different disciplinary approaches. Here we provide an account of how one group of interdisciplinary fog scientists intentionally catalyzed integrative capacity. Through conversation, collaborators negotiated their commitments regarding the ontology of fog systems and the (...) methodologies appropriate to studying fog systems, thereby enhancing capabilities which we take to constitute integrative capacity. On the ontological front, collaborators negotiated their commitments by setting boundaries to and within the system, layering different subsystems, focusing on key intersections of these subsystems, and agreeing on goals that would direct further investigation. On the methodological front, collaborators sequenced various methods, anchored methods at different scales, validated one method with another, standardized the outputs of related methods, and coordinated methods to fit a common model. By observing the process and form of collaborator conversations, this case study demonstrates that social studies of science can bring into critical focus how interdisciplinary collaborators work toward an integrated conceptualization of study systems. (shrink)

There have been several conscious efforts made by different stakeholders in the area of nanoscience and nanotechnology to increase the awareness of social and ethical issues (SEI) among its practitioners. But so far, little has been done at the laboratory level to integrate a SEI component into the laboratory orientation schedule of practitioners. Since the laboratory serves as the locus of activities of the scientific community, it is important to introduce SEI there to stimulate thinking and discussion of SEI among (...) practitioners, which would eventually contribute toward the responsible development of this technology. In this article, through an example (at the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility (CNF), practitioners of which represent a section of the nano researchers’ community in the USA), it is shown how a SEI component can be incorporated into the laboratory orientation schedule of the practitioners from diverse disciplinary and institutional backgrounds. Results show that, at CNF, the practitioners enjoyed the discussion since most of them learned about SEI for the first time in their professional career. At the same time, some of them were also knowledgeable about SEI and contributed to the debates. Moreover, the SEI orientation had significant positive impact on the scientific community enabling them to self-reflect upon their own research and its implications for the wider society. This article also describes the efforts that were undertaken to disseminate this form of SEI orientation to other 13 USA universities within the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN, one of the biggest networks funded from National Science Foundation for Nanotechnology research, of which CNF is a part). As a result of this effort, most of the NNIN sites have already started or were in the process of integrating a SEI component into their nanofabrication laboratories to make their users aware of SEI, ensuring eventual robust socio-technical integration in the NNIN laboratories. In the future, this form of SEI orientation can also be disseminated to other nanofabrication laboratories in the USA. (shrink)

The emergence of nanotechnology, with all its promises of economic, social, and medical benefits, along with dire predictions of environmental, health, and safety threats, has occasioned an active debate in the Science and Technology Studies field, in which we have seen five distinct conversations that frame the discussion. The topical threads include ethics, regulation, opportunities and threats including utopian/dystopian visions of the future, public perception, public participation. These conversational distinctions are not absolutes with firm borders as they clearly overlap at (...) many points. Nonetheless, common to all is a strong sense that control and consequence are significant problems that have yet to be addressed adequately by the promoters of nanotechnology. A final section addresses articles on nanotechnology that exemplify the social construction theory of technology. We include herein a selective summary of this recent body of science, technology, and society (STS) journal literature focused on the social and ethical interactions of nanotechnology (SEIN) that has emerged in the last few years. The intent is not to be encyclopedic in coverage, but rather to seek to understand, in a general way, the key issues and concepts STS scholars are discussing. It is clear that STS-oriented scholars are well poised to grapple explicitly with the cultural, socio-political, and ethical dimensions of nanotechnology. Drawing on understandings of earlier socio-technical areas of interest and concern—nuclear power, genetically modified organisms, the human genome—such scholars have moved well beyond the questions of whether and where nanotechnology intersects society. More important is their effort to seek an understanding in depth of exactly how they are socio-politically, culturally, and ethically interconnected. In doing so, SEIN studies have at the same time become increasingly diverse and more sophisticated and mature over the course of the past decade. Scholars have quite rightly recognized the inadequacies of blanket ideas of moratoria versus non-regulatory environments, utopian versus dystopian futures, and whether or not the public has a role to play in nanotechnology decision making. Rather, a more sophisticated, often case specific, flexible understanding of the societal context of a given issue or concern is called for. (shrink)