Knowing New Biotechnologies

Social Aspects of Technological Convergence

Matthias Wienroth, Eugénia Rodrigues

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317691501
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The areas of personal genomics and citizen science draw on – and bring together – different cultures of producing and managing knowledge and meaning. They also cross local and global boundaries, are subjects and objects of transformation and mobility of research practices, evaluation and multi-stakeholder groups. Thirdly, they draw on logics of 'convergence': new links between, and new kinds of, stakeholders, spaces, knowledge, practices, challenges and opportunities.

This themed collection of essays from nationally and internationally leading scholars and commentators advances and widens current debates in Science and Technology Studies and in Science Policy concerning 'converging technologies' by complementing the customary focus on technical aspirations for convergence with the analysis of the practices and logics of scientific, social and cultural knowledge production that constitute contemporary technoscience. In case studies from across the globe, contributors discuss the ways in which science and social order are linked in areas such as direct-to consumer genetic testing and do-it-yourself biotechnologies.

Organised into thematic sections, 'Knowing New Biotechnologies' explores:

• ways of understanding the dynamics and logics of convergences in emergent biotechnologies

• governance and regulatory issues around technoscientific convergences

• democratic aspects of converging technologies – lay involvement in scientific research and the co-production of biotechnology and social and cultural knowledge.

Part I

Introduction

1 An introduction to social convergences

Matthias Wienroth and Eugénia Rodrigues

Introduction

The notion of Converging Technologies has been part of national science policy discourses across the globe since the late 1990s. The unifying idea of these has been that the coming together of different compatible technologies will produce wide-ranging and beneficial social and economic changes. In order to foster technological convergences, and generate societal benefits upon application, proponents of the Converging Technologies (CT) discourse have called for considerable public funding to be made available to research, particularly in the fields of nano-, bio-, and information and communication technologies as well as cognitive science (this is the ‘NBIC’ dimension of the CT discourse; further discussion of this theme is available especially in Chapters 2 and 6 of this volume). In the last decade, the CT discourse has somewhat lost its drive due to a lack of significant and apparent impact from technological convergences, and the issue of still outstanding all-encompassing and game-changing societal benefits. This applies as much to the NBIC discourse as it does to genomic aspirations that were developed in the emergence and functioning of the Human Genome Project. While funding policy and research practice have aimed to associate research into social and ethical aspects of technoscience with publicly funded CT research projects, the focus on technological convergence within the CT discourse has neglected other kinds of convergence that occur in and around technoscience. This volume proposes a novel approach to thinking and analysing the very promissory concept of Converging Technologies: to focus on social aspects of technology discourses and practices, and to develop an understanding of social aspects as not only accompanying but, moreover, significantly contributing to technological convergences.

From workshop to book

On 27–28 September 2012, the ESRC Genomics Policy & Research Forum in Edinburgh, UK, organized a workshop inviting a variety of scholars from Europe and North America to discuss the ‘The Messiness of Convergence’. The aim of the event was:

to advance and widen current debates in Science and Technology Studies and in Science Policy concerning ‘Converging Technologies’ by complementing the customary focus on technical aspirations for convergence with the analysis of the practices and logics of scientific, social and cultural knowledge production that constitute contemporary technoscience. In case studies from across the globe, contributors discuss the ways in which science and social order are linked in areas such as direct-to-consumer genetic testing and do-it-yourself biotechnologies.

(workshop abstract)

While the notion of ‘convergence’ remained contested throughout the two-day event, the discussion of case studies in the context of Converging Technologies quickly directed attention to the apparent overlooking of the significance of social convergences in both shaping and constituting technological (or: techno-scientific) convergences. The discussions inspired the publication of this volume, and its outlook in terms of the three aspects of (1) logics and dynamics of social convergences; (2) implications for governance; and (3) social convergences in technoscientific appropriation by scientific amateurs outside academia, state laboratories, and industry. The empirically informed and fully peer-reviewed chapters in this book put forward different approaches to understanding these convergence processes and their governance in relation to the new biotechnologies, using in particular the examples of personal genomics and do-it-yourself biotechnology (including synthetic biology).

This prefatory chapter is divided into three sections: this introduction, a proposal for approaching the understanding of social convergences, and an overview of the chapters and their contributions to the discussion of social convergences and the CT policy discourse.

Understanding social convergences

Convergences enact technoscience. Scientific understanding develops not only through the elaboration of existing disciplines but through placing existing knowledges in novel combinations and new relationships. Sometimes new opportunities for knowledge development and for the creation of new products and technologies arise from these convergences. And science policies may build on this idea by trying to stimulate and fund work at promising intersections of knowledge, though such investments and interventions in the path of science are seldom unanimously agreed. Such was the case with the Human Genome Project (HGP). The HGP and the transcription of DNA have enabled a considerable number of research projects, and the development of a variety of applications. The original promise of the HGP was to provide the building plan for the human body, and via this knowledge to pretty much instantly enable the development of therapies and cures for a broad range of genetic diseases. This promise has not been fulfilled, yet; instead, the complexity of the genome and its interactions with the environment have become more apparent; and emerging genetic research has enabled the development of a variety of other applications including forensic phenotyping (for use in the criminal justice system), genetic testing for predispositions to certain diseases (for example as a commercial product), and anthropo-geographic mapping of human migration (towards an understanding of the interaction of genome and culture in human development). All of these can eventually contribute to the overall aim of developing genome-based therapies and cures.

Convergence describes transformative processes that lead to the creation of something novel beyond the sum of those aspects that are converging: knowledges, practices, stakeholders, artefacts, or spaces. While the notion of interdisciplinarity may lie at the heart of the CT discourse (Nordmann, 2004) as recently reaffirmed in a report by the US-American National Academy of Sciences (Board on Life Sciences, 2014), convergence does not simply equate to disciplinary synergy, and encompasses more than knowledges and skills. In this book we highlight the distinctively social dimensions of convergence. Social convergences can lead to new social formations (see Glasner et al., 2006). More specifically, this edited volume engages with convergences in the socio-political loci of technoscientific discourses and practices, potential and actual applications, promises, and imaginaries (see, for example, Chapters 3 and 6 in this volume). These social convergences constitute social elements such as stakeholder identity; defining-power (the power to participate in meaning- and decision-making); alliance building; forms of data collection, sharing, and use; socio-technical anticipatory governance and other forms of regulatory management and governance. Thus, in our view convergence describes social and technological practices that prepare the ground for changes; social convergences are moments at which new social identities, organizations, and relationships emerge. The concept reminds us that socio-technoscientific boundaries are diffuse and dynamic.

Strikingly, convergences need not be limited to collaborations between existing technoscientific actors. They may provide opportunities for new kinds of social actors, though the convergence process can also shape the conditions for those actors’ participation. Material manifestations of social convergence include home-based genetic-mapping kits for inferring the user’s biogeographic ancestry where the level of informativeness and the practical use of such information are not apparent to the consumer beyond the notion of identifying one’s genetic heritage. Here, ideas and practices of commerce, research, and healthcare come together in a context that seems to require close governance but in practice depends on non-specific regulation instead. A more widely used application is the home pregnancy test as a domesticated health service and instrument (see Chapter 8 in this volume). Both tests are anticipatory, and engage users’ expectations about their personal and social identity, their obligations, and their involvement in research and production that is remote from the user, may include her in these processes but does not provide any feedback. We find a similar convergence of identities, roles, spaces, and uses reflected in the shift from treating illness to anticipating illness and treating expectations in the healthcare system. Personal genomics has had an effect on consumers, with them (for example) taking medication in order to try to avoid falling ill with future medical conditions implied by readings of their genome. This is a convergence of personal genomics, healthcare, and commerce, and individual consumer and healthcare behaviour in which all three are changed.

Another example of social convergence is the way that public views of science, and involvement in science, shape scientific enquiry and the public articulation of science by researchers:

Recent decades have seen an increased demand from citizens, civic groups and non-governmental organisations for greater scrutiny of the evidence that underpins scientific conclusions. In some fields, there is growing participation by members of the public in research programmes, as so-called citizen scientists: blurring the divide between professional and amateur in new ways.

(Royal Society, 2012: 7)

These so-called ‘citizen scientists’, or science amateurs, are slowly gaining some recognition from academics, and indeed there are cases of collaboration where the work does not consist of simply using citizens as calculating machines nor drawing on the computing power of citizens who own PCs, but where ‘citizens’ collect data as a distributed research community. Beyond that, and primarily in the do-it-yourself community, science amateurs develop and conduct their own experiments (see, for example, Chapter 10 in this volume).

In a highly competitive research environment, citizen scientists find themselves enrolled in the boundary work of academic scientists in which one hypothesis or practice of work is bounded against another along the lines of ‘scientific’ and ‘non-scientific’ or ‘serious science’ and ‘storytelling’. This is a practice academic scientists engage in with colleagues as well as with nonacademic researchers, including commercial players such as personal genomics companies who offer biogeographic ancestry testing. Publics’ scientific interest and literacy are aspects of this constant negotiation of new and emergent science and technology. A Guardian article by Prof. Mark Thomas (‘To claim someone has “Viking ancestors” is no better than astrology’, 25 February 2013), and the response to it by Prof. Martin Richards and Dr Vincent Macaulay (‘It is unfair to compare genetic ancestry testing to astrology’, 8 April 2013), engage in negotiating science in and for society. They each make evaluative, boundary-defining statements about the scientific work of commercial stakeholders who offer biogeographic ancestry genetic testing, and the impact of such commercial use on the role of science. While Thomas’s argument largely adheres to the well-rehearsed line of des-interested science as ‘real science’ (see Ziman, 2002), his article – unwittingly – traces social convergences in concerns about the representation of scientific ideas in the public domain (here, in response to a BBC Radio 4 interview with Alistair Moffat, managing director of commercial provider BritainsDNA, about commercial biogeographic ancestry genetic testing), about the informativity of emergent scientific technologies, their early commercial uptake, and the nature of customers’ self-identity formation through consuming such technologies. Richards and Macaulay, on the other hand, view ancestry genetic testing as a public technology to raise interest in science, and they see scientific enquiry as part of creating a grand narrative about humanity, and interpretation of data – rather than an insistence on ‘pure fact’ – as a key aspect of technology use. For our purposes, the discussion provides an example of how the appropriation of emerging technoscience impacts on expectations of stakeholders about the further trajectory of related scientific enquiry, how such enquiry is related to changes in the social fabric of technology use and discourse.

Book overview

Grounded in case studies and alert to current theoretical treatments of the issues at stake, the contributing authors provide insightful discussion of these and other examples of social convergence in more depth. While some authors focus on their respective examples, others also provide a thorough reflection on existing Converging Technologies discourses such as NBIC as the basis for developing critical understandings of social convergences in the context of technological convergence – what overall might be described as technoscientific or, with Christopher Groves in Chapter 4, as socio-technical convergence.

Following the current chapter, Douglas Robinson provides an introduction to the narrative history of the CT programme with a focus on the notion of NBIC, leading him to attend to the disconnection between the policy programme and vision of CT and technological convergence in research and product development. Tropes addressed in this chapter are taken up throughout the book, beginning with Part II on the logics and dynamics of social convergences.

Part II Logics and dynamics

The concept of social convergences encaps...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgement
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Dynamics and logics
• Part III: Governance
• Part IV: Citizens, amateurs, and democratization
• Part V: Commentary
• Index