Tag: RRI
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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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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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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,…
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Why we should care about the language we use in science
This post first appeared in the ‘On Society’ blog at BioMed Central and is reposted here with permission. *** Brigitte Nerlich and Carmen McLeod at the Synthetic Biology Research Centre at the University of Nottingham have given ‘Responsible Research and Innovation’ a new twist, by focusing on responsible language use. As everybody knows by now, words matter in politics as…
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Making science by publicity stunt: The case of the CRISPR babies
Science is supposed to be a public, systematic, consensible, evidence-based and collaborative enterprise. It’s also supposed to be carried out responsibly, not recklessly. Making science in public and making science public are complex processes. Making public science normally doesn’t consist in presenting fellow-scientists and members of the public with a ‘fait accompli’. This is however…
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Minimal biology
This morning (3rd November) I saw a tweet by @BrisSynBio announcing “Max Planck-Bristol Centre for Minimal Biology announced @BristolUni & @maxplanckpress partner to pursue game-changing research in the emerging field of #minimalbiology to address some of the most complex challenges in fundamental science”. I became curious and read the whole announcement, balking a bit at the pressreleasish…
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Anticipating public reactions to emerging sciences and technologies: Nano, synbio and AI
In around 2003 I woke up to nanotechnology because I was watching my son play a computer game that involved ‘nano-armour’. That pricked my curiosity. Later I came across a quote from Howard Lovy, then editor of Small Times: “Nanotechnology, independent of its development as a science, is spreading as a cultural idea and icon.…
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Genome editing in the news: Trying to keep up
Gene/genome editing has been much in the news recently and it is becoming increasingly difficult to stay on top of new developments. The last two weeks alone have seen major announcements, which I shall briefly list in this blog post. This leads me to a question that has been troubling me: How does one do…