Science to the Rescue?

During difficult times, many argue that science will come to our rescue. Investment in science, technology, data, and innovation is seen to be vital if we are to tackle the most pressing concerns facing society. But not everyone shares this enthusiasm: Whether it be anti-vaxxers or climate change deniers, there has been an increased adoption of populist views that seemingly reject the rationalism of science. This rise is not evidence of a public rejection of rational thinking, however, but rather a growing difference in the way people experience the effects of science and technology. Rather than a perceived crisis of trust, our biggest source of concern should be the different ways that technology shapes our worlds

Providing ethics advice in a pandemic, in theory and in practice: A taxonomy of ethics advice

The pandemic significantly raised the stakes for the translation of bioethics insights into policy. The novelty, range and sheer quantity of the ethical problems that needed to be addressed urgently within public policy were unprecedented and required high-bandwidth two-way transfer of insights between academic bioethics and policy. Countries such as the United Kingdom, which do not have a National Ethics Committee, faced particular challenges in how to facilitate this. This paper takes as a case study the brief career of the Ethics Advisory Board (EAB) for the NHS Covid-19 App, which shows both the difficulty and the political complexity of policy-relevant bioethics in a pandemic and how this was exacerbated by the transience and informality of the structures through which ethics advice was delivered. It analyses how and why, after EAB's demise, the Westminster government increasingly sought to either take its ethics advice in private or to evade ethical scrutiny of its policies altogether. In reflecting on EAB, and these later ethics advice contexts, the article provides a novel framework for analysing ethics advice within democracies, defining four idealised stances: the pure ethicist, the advocate, the ethics arbiter and the critical friend

Data ethics in an emergency

Has data ethics been a casualty of COVID-19? Data have played a central role in how we understand, mitigate and adapt to COVID-19. For instance, it was critical to the work of new public infrastructures such as vaccine certification systems and test and trace infrastructures. Aggregated data about individuals provided the basis for priority shielding lists that protect people deemed vulnerable to COVID-19, and also remade the very categories of vulnerability on which decisions to recommend or enforce their shielding and isolation depended. But what happens in emergencies when urgency trumps careful deliberation? In this chapter, we aim to understand how ethics advice featured in decision-making and the governance arrangements of data use in such situations, arguing that a set of ‘emergency data ethics’ are needed to help guide thinking in a future emergency

Assessing responsible innovation training

There is broad agreement that one important aspect of responsible innovation (RI) is to provide training on its principles and practices to current and future researchers and innovators, notably including doctoral students. Much less agreement can be observed concerning the question of what this training should consist of, how it should be delivered and how it could be assessed. The increasing institutional embedding of RI leads to calls for the alignment of RI training with training in other subjects. One can therefore observe a push towards the official assessment of RI training, for example in the recent call for proposals for centres for doctoral training by UK Research and Innovation. This editorial article takes its point of departure from the recognition that the RI community will need to react to the call for assessment of RI training. It provides an overview of the background and open questions around RI training and assessment as a background of examples of RI training assessment at doctoral level. There is unlikely to be one right way of assessing RI training across institutions and disciplines, but we expect that the examples provided in this article can help RI scholars and practitioners orient their training and its assessment in ways that are academically viable as well as supportive of the overall aims of RI

Assessing Responsible Innovation Training

There is broad agreement that one important aspect of responsible innovation (RI) is to provide training on its principles and practices to current and future researchers and innovators, notably including doctoral students. Much less agreement can be observed concerning the question of what this training should consist of, how it should be delivered and how it could be assessed. The increasing institutional embedding of RI leads to calls for the alignment of RI training with training in other subjects. One can therefore observe a push towards the official assessment of RI training, for example in the recent call for proposals for centres for doctoral training by UK Research and Innovation. This editorial article takes its point of departure from the recognition that the RI community will need to react to the call for assessment of RI training. It provides an overview of the background and open questions around RI training and assessment as a background of examples of RI training assessment at doctoral level. There is unlikely to be one right way of assessing RI training across institutions and disciplines, but we expect that the examples provided in this article can help RI scholars and practitioners orient their training and its assessment in ways that are academically viable as well as supportive of the overall aims of RI

Co creation in social innovation

The Encyclopedia of Social Innovation will serve as a significant reference point for both scholars and students of social entrepreneurship, sociology and management

UK Covid-19 Inquiry: Terms of Reference Consultation Response

Written evidence submitted by the UK Pandemic Ethics Accelerator’s Data-Use workstream to the online consultation at ukcovid19inquiry.citizenspace.co

United Kingdom: The developing relationship between science and society

The 1950s British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan is reported to have replied to a journalist’s question as to what was likely to blow his government off course with the words ‘events, dear boy, events’. The development of science communication in the UK from the mid-1980s onwards is one of the best-documented stories in this field, punctuated by a series of reports from both the scientific community and the government itself—and by a number of ‘Macmillian events’ that blew science’s relationship with the wider world hither and thither. Here we offer a series of episodes that changed how we think about the relationship between science and society. We describe these largely chronologically and imply that they heralded new eras of science communication. This does not mean, however, that previous approaches simply disappeared: many old ideas were buried momentarily or continued as an undercurrent, less visible but ready to resurface as and when conditions allowed and required them to do so