Tag: responsible innovation
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Asilomar 1975 and 2025: Speech acts and the performance of responsibility
On 1 August 2026 Yonatan Chemla and Christopher A. Voigt published a report in Trends in Biotechnology, entitled “Responsible biotechnology: An analysis of the Asilomar 2025 entreaties”. This caught my attention, because, just over ten years ago, I wrote a blog post about the first Asilomar conference held in 1975 entitled ‘Ta(l)king responsibility’. And, of…
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When the world falls apart, enjoy a metaphor!
I have been writing blog posts since 2012. They dealt mainly with topics relating to climate change, the biosciences, infectious diseases, and more recently AI. Occasionally, I branched out into space or into the 19th century. That happened at times when the tectonic plates of politics shifted, such as after Brexit, the first Trump government,…
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Organoid Intelligence
I have written about organoids and intelligence, especially of the artificial kind. However, I haven’t explored ‘organoid intelligence‘ until now. Despite this concept emerging around 2022, it escaped my attention. So, I have some catching up to do. In this post, I’ll first briefly define organoids and organoid intelligence. Then I’ll examine the pioneers who…
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Artificial Intelligence: Education and entertainment
I have heard about artificial intelligence or AI for decades, but I have never really played with it. I guess this is the same for many people. We might have AI all around us, but at the end of 2022 it became much more tangible – we had it at our fingertips. A company called…
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Gene drive in the press: Between responsible research and responsible communication
Gene drive is a controversial genetic engineering technique that allows scientists to modify genes so that they quickly spread through a population without following the typical rules of heredity; this can include genes that are of no benefit to the plant or animal involved. Research into gene drives has accelerated since 2015 when another new…
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Making Science Public 2021: End of year round-up of blog posts
We are coming to the end of a another pandemic year, and time seems to expand endlessness towards an uncertain horizon. That means quite a few of my blog posts this year were still devoted to covid and the pandemic, but I also wrote about genetics, climate change and some other incidental topics. As usual,…
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From RRI to RBM: How gene drive drives new efforts in engagement
The other day, I was listening to the very interesting history of genetic engineering, including gene editing and gene drive, as told by Matthew Cobb in his three-part radio series: Genetic dreams, genetic nightmares. This reminded me that I hadn’t thought or written about gene drive for a while, one of the most controversial genetic…
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Synthetic biology, engineering biology and responsible innovation
Between about 2014 and 2018 I have been involved in the social and communications side of ‘synthetic biology’. I was especially interested in synthetic biology with relation to ‘responsible innovation’ or ‘responsible research and innovation’ or RRI (here are some blog posts). Since then other issues have pre-occupied my mind and I lost a bit…
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The Missing Ingredient: Capacity Building’s Role in Developing Responsible Innovation Systems
This is a guest post by Patrick Backhouse who is an undergraduate student at the University of Exeter Business School. Patrick has been studying responsible innovation as part of a module led by Dr Katie Ledingham. This blog post is based on an essay that he wrote for this module. *** Responsible Innovation (RI) is…
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Alchemarium
This is a guest/cross-post by Peter Broks on a new engagement tool he has developed, which looks fascinating. *** Much of what we all do can be seen as a form of alchemy. We start with something; we process it; and, if all goes well, we turn it into something we value more highly. Certainly,…