Tag Archives: LSE

An art to synthetic biology governance?

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The Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars will be hosting, courtesy of its Synthetic Biology Project (SynBio Project), an event on March 27, 2012 titled (from the March 21, 2012 event announcement),

The Art of Synthetic Biology Governance: Considering the Concepts of Scientific Uncertainty and Cross-Borderness

When: March 27, 2012 from 12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. (Light lunch available at noon.)

Who: Dr. Claire Marris, [senior research fellow at] King’s College London [and one of the report’s authors]

David Rejeski, Director, Science and Technology Innovation Program, will moderate the session

Where: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

5th Floor Conference Room
Ronald Reagan Building
1300 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, D.C.

Sadly, it seems that there will not be a webcast, livestreamed or otherwise so the only option is to attend in person. If you can attend in person, here’s the registration link.

This event marks the release of a new working paper from the London School Economics (LSE), “BIOS working paper no. 4, The Transnational Governance of Synthetic Biology: Scientific uncertainty, cross-borderness and the ‘art’ of governance.” BTW, BIOS is the LSE’s Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society.

There’s more about the report here, as well as, a PDF of the report on the Synbio Project website. I’ve only read about 1/4 of the report and can only comment on their general approach which I find quite interesting. From the executive summary of the working report, The Transnational Governance of Synthetic Biology: Scientific uncertainty, cross-borderness and the ‘art’ of governance,

The paper goes beyond proposals to mitigate specific risks of synthetic biology to investigate the root causes of such concerns, and address the challenges at an overarching level.

…Effective governance seeks to foster good science, not to hamper it, but recognises that good science goes hand in hand with open, clear, transparent regulation to ensure both trust and accountability.

• Such an ‘art of governance’ seeks to facilitate effective interactions between the range of current and emerging social actors involved in or affected by scientific and technological developments, to ensure that all parties have the opportunity to express their perspectives and interests at all stages in the pathways of research and development, through transparent and democratic processes. The art of governance recognises that no decisions will suit all actors, but effective compromise depends on ensuring openness and transparency in the process by which decisions are reached, demonstrating genuine consideration of all perspectives.

We highlight three crucial challenges for the effective national and international governance of synthetic biology:

• FIRST, governance of science is not just a matter of governing the production and application of knowledge, but must also recognise that scientific uncertainty is not merely temporary but endemic: not merely calculable risks, but provisional unknowns, unknown unknowns, and even wilful ignorance or a conscious inability-to-know. Such ‘non-knowing’ cannot be overcome simply by acquiring more knowledge: increasing knowledge often leads to increasing uncertainty. [emphasis mine] Effective governance of synthetic biology must give explicit and attention to both knowledge and non-knowing.

• SECOND, synthetic biology relies on collaborative contributions from distinct disciplines and professions, and this requires accountability beyond that internal to each field. While good governance of synthetic biology demands proper accountability within scientific disciplines and professional bodies, it also requires the cultivation of external accountability, not only across and between such fields, but beyond, to all those who may be affected. Such networks of accountability accommodate change over time, facilitate mutual trust and responsiveness among various groups and constituencies, encourage good practice and robust science, and enhance openness and transparency. [emphasis mine]

• THIRD, the combination of scientific uncertainty and cross-borderness ensures that no single group, organization, constituency or regulatory body will have the capacity to oversee, let alone to control, the development of synthetic biology. An art of governance is required to accept the constitutive fragmentation of social authorities, and to work with such diversity, not as a hindrance, but as a condition of, and advantage for, effective governance. [emphasis mine]

In the light of these three challenges, we argue that scientifically informed, evidence-based approaches to policy-making, while essential, are insufficient. It is time to bring back a sense of the ‘art’ to the governance of biotechnology: an approach which employs proactive, open-ended regulatory styles able to work with uncertainty and change, to make links across borders, and to adapt to evolving relations among changing stakeholders, including researchers, research funders, industry, and multiple publics. (pp. 3-4)

I quite appreciate the descriptions of uncertainty and unknowingness as I’ve been coming to that conclusion for some time but they’ve said more elegantly than I can. As for the art of governance as a means of dealing with the cross-borderness (similar terms in academia include: transdisciplinary, crossdisciplinary, and multidisciplinary), as well as the uncertainty  inherent to synthetic biology (and the other emerging technologies) I like the proposed metaphor and scope of this approach to governance.  They may seem unattainable but it’s important to set one’s sights as high as possible in these types of efforts because inevitably the grand ideas will be chopped down to size in practice, in much the same way that one uses a large piece of marble to sculpt a statue which will have significantly less mass.

London School of Economics offers a guide to Twitter for researchers

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More specifically the guide is being offered by the London School of Economics (LSE) Public Policy Group and it’s called, Using Twitter in university research, teaching and impact activities (pdf). From the Feb. 22, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

Thousands of academics and researchers at all levels of experience and across all disciplines already use Twitter daily, alongside more than 200 million other users.

Yet how can such a brief medium have any relevance to universities and academia, where journal articles are 3,000 to 8,000 words long, and where books contain 80,000 words? Can anything of academic value ever be said in just 140 characters?

This guide answers these questions, showing you how to get started on Twitter and showing you how Twitter can be used as a resource for research, teaching and impact activities.

Here’s a sample of some of the advice offered in the 12 pp. guide,

A Twitter operation can add extra value to almost any research project in several ways.

Tweet about each new publication, website update or new blog that the project completes. To gauge feedback, you could send a tweet that links to your research blog and ask your followers for their feedback and comments.

For tweeting to work well, always make sure that an open-web full version or summary of every publication, conference presentation or talk at an event is available online. Summarize every article published in closed-web journal on a blog, or lodge an extended summary on your university’s online research depository. In addition, sites like www.scribd.com are useful for depositing open web versions.

Tweet about new developments of interest from the project’s point of view, for instance, relevant government policy changes, think tank reports, or journal articles.

Use hashtags (#) to make your materials more visible – e.g. #phdchat. Don’t be afraid to start your own.

Use your tweets to cover developments at other related research sites, retweeting interesting new material that they produce. This may appear to some as ‘helping the competition’, but in most research areas the key problem is to get more attention for the area as a whole. Building up a Twitter network of reciprocating research projects can help everyone to keep up to date more easily, improve the standard and pace of debate, and so attract more attention (and funding) into the research area.

Twitter provides many opportunities for ‘crowd sourcing’ research activities across the sciences, social sciences, history and literature – by getting people to help with gathering information, making observations, undertaking data analysis, transcribing and editing documents – all done just for the love of it. Some researchers have also used Twitter to help ‘crowdsource’ research funding from interested public bodies. You can read more about crowdsourcing at the LSE Impact blog. (p. 8)

For anyone who doesn’t already have an account, it’s pretty easy to set one up at Twitter.com. Once you’re set up, you can follow Nanowerk by going here: http://twitter.com/nanowerk and/or you can follow me at http://twitter.com/frogheart.

Nanotechnology and HIV prevention; flying frogs; nanotech regulation conference

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It seems to me that whenever researchers announce a nanotechnology application they always estimate that it will take five years before reaching the commercial market. Well, the researchers at the University at Utah are estimating five to seven years before their gel-based anti-HIV condom for women comes to market. From the media release on Azonano,

University of Utah bioengineer Patrick Kiser analyzes polymers used to develop a new kind of AIDS-preventing vaginal gel for eventual use by women in Africa and other impoverished areas. The newly invented gel would be inserted a few hours before sex. During intercourse, polymers — long, chain-like molecules — within the gel become “crosslinked,” forming a microscopic mesh that, in lab experiments, physically trapped HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) particles.

…

The crosslinked polymers form a mesh that is smaller than microscopic, and instead is nanoscopic – on the scale of atoms and molecules – with a mesh size of a mere 30 to 50 nanometers – or 30 to 50 billionths of a meter. (A meter is about 39 inches.)

By comparison, an HIV particle is about 100 nanometers wide, sperm measure about 5 to 10 microns (5,000 to 10,000 nanometers) in cross section, and the width of a human hair is roughly 100 microns (100,000 nanometers)

I’m not sure why there is such an emphasis on women in the continent of Africa as I’m sure if this product is successful, it could be used in many environments and by many women regardless of their geography.

From 1998 to 2008, researchers found a flying frog in the Eastern Himalayas along with 350 other new species, according to the World Wildlife Federation. From the media release on Physorg.com,

A decade of research carried out by scientists in remote mountain areas endangered by rising global temperatures brought exciting discoveries such as a bright green frog that uses its red and long webbed feet to glide in the air.

A frog that flies -- new species found in Eastern Himalayas

A frog that flies -- new species found in Eastern Himalayas

More details can be found in the media release.

In September, there will be two meetings, one held in London and another in Washington, DC, to discuss a collaborative research project, Regulating Nanotechnologies in the EU and US.  I mentioned the meetings and registration information in an earlier posting here and there’s more information on Nanowerk News here.

I mentioned an event that Raincoaster was organizing, a 3-day novel workshop on the upcoming Labour Day weekend. Unfortunately, it’s been canceled due to one of the downsides of being a freelancer (when you get sick there’s nobody to fill in for you) and arrangements for the lodge/resort couldn’t be finalized in time.