cspawn

The newest SoapBox article is a Memorial Day-inspired poem from Dan Sarewitz entitled “Progress and the Final Sacrifice.” Dan draws our attention to the fact that much of technological advance has come as a result of efforts to kill more effectively:

Let us know humanity by the ever-great efficiency and creativity
with which it visits death upon itself,
And wars by the salutary influence they have
on what we are pleased to call progress.

The CSPO website has a (relatively) new feature called SoapBox - a space for short articles, musings, and topical pieces of general interest. It is not unlike this blog, except that it’s not a blog, and at this point has no forum for discussion.

So, I am going to start making a habit of linking to SoapBox articles here (as I did with Jenny’s post on Mother’s Day), in order to provide that discussion space.

The latest on SoapBox is a fascinating account by Dan Sarewitz of a trip he took with his son to the Museum of Human Frailty.

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Continuing the thread from an earlier post, in which I asked “how has the Obama transition affected your research?” I thought I’d point to an interesting survey of the President’s science budget in this week’s issue of Science Magazine. There are a few interesting themes.

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Oh, the ol’ elevator speech…  I am so bad at this.  Lately, my “speech” has been so boring that I find myself tuning out after just a few words.  The problem is complicated by the fact that I keep changing my topic.  (THIS IS A VERY BAD IDEA AFTER 3.5 YEARS IN GRAD SCHOOL, just in case you were wondering…)

Here’s my speech:

I study bioethics committees in the federal government and in bioscience companies.    Specifically, I’m looking at the presidential bioethics committees under President Clinton and President G.W. Bush, and the bioethics committees of SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline) and Advanced Cell Technology.  I compare the motivations that led to their creation, the expectations of what the committees would do (as well as the reasons given for their creation - which may be quite different than the initial motivation), and the actual work the committees do.  I’m interested in understanding what the similar tensions and challenges are in public and private sector bioethics, in terms of mandate, membership, legitimacy, and advice.

There’s a big debate in bioethics about whether the integrity of bioethics is diminished if ethics advice is “sold” to companies.  But we actually know very little about what bioethics committees in the private sector do, and how their advice is used.  Why/are we more suspicious of bioethics committees in the private sector than the public sector, where the committees face charges of politicization, political manipulation, and bias?

***

So, yeah… I struggle with this.  I love my project (because it makes me uncomfortable), but I have trouble describing it quickly.  In part because I’m not yet terribly clear on the term of comparison between public and private sector committees.  In my head I know there’s an interesting point of comparison, I just have to make it explicit.  A common problem for comparative studies, I think?  Maybe?

Et tu?  What are y’all working on?

Through the research of programs such as the Center for Nanotechnology in Society; the Science Policy Assessment and Research on Climate program; and the Public Values Mapping Project; CSPO advances new ideas about how to manage, and think about the societal impacts of science and technology. The NSF now funds the Science of Science and Innovation Policy (SciSIP), and the OSTP sponsors an interagency working group that deals with the topic. And the emergence of resources and an intellectual space for this kind of work (and I have cited only a few notable examples) is itself a testament to one kind of impact CSPO and others are having.

But what about applying the work? This goes beyond building a field of scholarship, or demonstrating - however vividly - the need for this kind of research. David Bruggeman has been pointing out (here, here, and here) that we are far from figuring that one out. As David notes:

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Jenny Brian, a student at CSPO and in the Biology and Society Program in the School of Life Sciences, has an article on the CSPO home page focusing on the barrage of “expert” advice confronting mothers at every step of the way. She asks:

How do mothers ever make sense of the constant deluge of expert and scientific advice? What can we do to help them, and what can they teach us about evaluating expert advice?

It’s worth reading the whole thing. Enjoy!