Repertoires: How to Transform a Project into a Research Community

SubmittedArticleHow effectively communities of scientists come together and co-operate is crucial both to the quality of research outputs and to the extent to which such outputs integrate insights, data and methods from a variety of fields, laboratories and locations around the globe. This essay focuses on the ensemble of material and social conditions that makes it possible for a short-¬‐term collaboration, set up to accomplish a specific task, to give rise to relatively stable communities of researchers. We refer to these distinctive features as repertoires, and investigate their development and implementation across three examples of collaborative research in the life sciences. We conclude that whether a particular project ends up fostering the emergence of a resilient research community is partly determined by the degree of attention and care devoted by researchers to material and social elements beyond the specific research questions under consideration

Bioethics Authorship in Context: How Trends in Biomedicine Challenge Bioethics

This is an Author's Original Manuscript of an article whose final and definitive form, the Version of Record, has been published in The American Journal of Bioethics 2011. Available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/ or DOI: 10.1080/15265161.2011.603808Resnik and Master (2011) propose a set of authorship guidelines for what they describe as “conceptual” papers in bioethics. These guidelines specifically address who should count as an author within multiply-authored conceptual research publications, given that various guidelines exist regarding empirical research in bioethics. Their arguments attend to an important and controversial issue, yet they do not take account of the broader historical and social contexts surrounding the growth of multiply-authored research publications. In this paper, we outline some of the characteristics of that context, particularly the rise of “big science” and its effects on patterns of practice (including authorship criteria) in the biomedical sciences and in turn bioethics. We then point to ways in which taking account of this context leads to challenges to some of Resnik and Master’s conclusions, and sketch alternative models that could overcome those difficulties

Model Organisms

A philosophical exploration of the concept of the 'model organism' in contemporary biology. Thinking about model organisms in order to examine how living organisms have been brought into the laboratory and used to gain a better understanding of biology, and to explore the research practices, commitments, and norms underlying this understanding

Designing a "good life" for livestock: Could gene editing improve farm animal welfare in low- and middle- income countries?

Gene editing's successful application to benefit farm animals' welfare is unlikely in the short to medium term, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), given the high costs and low rates of success to date in research settings.Reasons: 1. Gene editing is biased toward outcomes that can be easily measured and assessed. More complex traits associated with animal welfare such as behavior or condition are less likely to be targeted using gene editing.  2. Gene editing has been designed for use in vertically integrated production systems as livestock breeding is centralized and breeds themselves are highly standardised in these systems. Many LMICs lack vertically integrated production systems, have higher numbers of smallholder farmers, lack investment by companies and NGOs to promote these technologies, lack gene editing researchers, and have limited local support for biotechnology research and training.Potential downsides of gene editing: 1. Where the intensification of livestock production is growing, gene editing is likely to further accelerate intensification and disadvantage farmers relying on less intensive production systems. 2. Genetic diversity across traditional breeds is valuable and should be maintained. It is not clear how gene editing could affect this diversity.There may be specific applications that could lead to improvements in animal welfare in certain LMICs, for example: 1. Using gene editing to bias sex ratios could be particularly valuable in India, given the country's extensive dairy industry. 2. Sex selection in layer hens in Egypt, given hens there are raised in an increasingly vertically integrated production system. 3. Producing polled cattle and eliminating the need for mechanical dehorning as currently occurs in many locales.Many farm animal welfare issues in LMICs are less likely to be addressed through applications of gene editing as opposed to lower technological measures such as better access to veterinary services, better management practices, improved biosecurity, and poverty reduction

Repertoires: A Post-Kuhnian Perspective on Collaborative Research

We propose a framework to describe, analyze, and explain the conditions under which scientific communities organize themselves to do research, particularly within large-scale, multidisciplinary projects. The framework centers on the notion of a research repertoire, which encompasses well-aligned assemblages of the skills, behaviors, and material, social, and epistemic components that a group may use to practice certain kinds of science, and whose enactment affects the methods and results of research. This account provides an alternative to the idea of Kuhnian paradigms for understanding scientific change in the following ways: (1) it does not frame change as primarily generated and shaped by theoretical developments, but rather takes account of administrative, material, technological, and institutional innovations that contribute to change and explicitly questions whether and how such innovations accompany, underpin, and/or undercut theoretical shifts; (2) it thus allows for tracking of the organization, continuity, and coherence in research practices which Kuhn characterized as ‘normal science’ without relying on the occurrence of paradigmatic shifts and revolutions to be able to identify relevant components; and (3) it requires particular attention be paid to the performative aspects of science, whose study Kuhn pioneered but which he did not extensively conceptualize. We provide a detailed characterization of repertoires and discuss their relationship with communities, disciplines, and other forms of collaborative activities within science, building on an analysis of historical episodes and contemporary developments in the life sciences, as well as cases drawn from social and historical studies of physics, psychology, and medicine

A matter of conscience? The democratic significance of \u27conscience votes\u27 in legislating bioethics in Australia

In Australia, members of a political party are expected to vote as a block on the instructions of their party. Occasionally a ‘conscience vote’ (or ‘free vote’) is allowed, which releases parliamentarians from the obligation to maintain party discipline and permits them to vote according to their ‘conscience.’ In recent years Australia has had a number of conscience votes in federal Parliament, many of which have focused on bioethical issues (e.g., euthanasia, abortion, RU486, and embryonic/stem cell research and cloning). This paper examines the use of conscience votes in six key case studies in these contested areas of policy-making, with particular attention to their implications for promoting democratic values and the significance of women’s Parliamentary participation

The Bermuda Triangle : the pragmatics, policies, and principles for data sharing in the history of the Human Genome Project

© The Author(s), 2018. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Journal of the History of Biology 51 (2018): 693–805, doi:10.1007/s10739-018-9538-7.The Bermuda Principles for DNA sequence data sharing are an enduring legacy of the Human Genome Project (HGP). They were adopted by the HGP at a strategy meeting in Bermuda in February of 1996 and implemented in formal policies by early 1998, mandating daily release of HGP-funded DNA sequences into the public domain. The idea of daily sharing, we argue, emanated directly from strategies for large, goal-directed molecular biology projects first tested within the “community” of C. elegans researchers, and were introduced and defended for the HGP by the nematode biologists John Sulston and Robert Waterston. In the C. elegans community, and subsequently in the HGP, daily sharing served the pragmatic goals of quality control and project coordination. Yet in the HGP human genome, we also argue, the Bermuda Principles addressed concerns about gene patents impeding scientific advancement, and were aspirational and flexible in implementation and justification. They endured as an archetype for how rapid data sharing could be realized and rationalized, and permitted adaptation to the needs of various scientific communities. Yet in addition to the support of Sulston and Waterston, their adoption also depended on the clout of administrators at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the UK nonprofit charity the Wellcome Trust, which together funded 90% of the HGP human sequencing effort. The other nations wishing to remain in the HGP consortium had to accommodate to the Bermuda Principles, requiring exceptions from incompatible existing or pending data access policies for publicly funded research in Germany, Japan, and France. We begin this story in 1963, with the biologist Sydney Brenner’s proposal for a nematode research program at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) at the University of Cambridge. We continue through 2003, with the completion of the HGP human reference genome, and conclude with observations about policy and the historiography of molecular biology