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Dive into the research topics where Emma Frow is active.

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Featured researches published by Emma Frow.


Journal of Responsible Innovation | 2014

Responsible innovation across borders: tensions, paradoxes and possibilities

Phil Macnaghten; Richard Owen; Jack Stilgoe; Brian Wynne; A. Azevedo; A. de Campos; Jason Chilvers; Renato Dagnino; G. di Giulio; Emma Frow; Brian Garvey; Christopher Robert Groves; Sarah Hartley; M. Knobel; E. Kobayashi; M. Lehtonen; Javier Lezaun; Leonardo Freire de Mello; Marko Monteiro; J. Pamplona da Costa; C. Rigolin; B. Rondani; Margarita Staykova; Renzo Taddei; C. Till; David Tyfield; S. Wilford; Léa Velho

In March 2014 a group of early career researchers and academics from Sao Paulo state and from the UK met at the University of Campinas to participate in a workshop on ‘Responsible Innovation and the Governance of Socially Controversial Technologies’. In this Perspective we describe key reflections and observations from the workshop discussions, paying particular attention to the discourse of responsible innovation from a cross-cultural perspective. We describe a number of important tensions, paradoxes and opportunities that emerged over the three days of the workshop.


Food Security | 2009

The politics of plants.

Emma Frow; David Ingram; Wayne Powell; Deryck Steer; Johannes C. Vogel; Steven Yearley

Food security is not a new concern, but has taken on new dimensions in recent years. Here we position food security in a broader context relating to the use and management of global biomass resources, and specifically the push to develop a ‘bio-based economy’. We note a growing focus on plants as a source of innovative solutions to complex problems including food security, energy security, climate change and global environmental health. However, we also note that plants are a renewable but finite resource, and propose that renewed enthusiasm for plants is resulting in an increasingly complicated ‘politics of plants,’ as competition for limited land and biomass resources intensifies—the clash between food security and energy security over biofuels being an obvious example. Plants are a common thread across many policy domains including agriculture, energy, environment, health, and industry, and as such we suggest that they might provide a focal point for joined-up thinking and governance. We identify this broader picture as an important backdrop for discussions regarding food security, and from our proposed framework develop a number of recommendations for further investigation.


Biochemical Journal | 2000

Thrombospondin 1 does not activate transforming growth factor β1 in a chemically defined system or in smooth-muscle-cell cultures

David J. Grainger; Emma Frow

The cytokine transforming growth factor beta1 (TGF-beta1) is secreted in a latent form that has no known biological activity. The conversion of latent TGF-beta1 into its biologically active 25 kDa form is thought to be an important step in the regulation of TGF-beta activity both in cell culture and in vivo. Thrombospondin (TSP)-1, a 360 kDa platelet alpha-granule and extracellular matrix protein, has been shown to participate in TGF-beta1 activation. We have used a chemically defined system to examine the mechanism of TSP-1-mediated TGF-beta1 activation. However, the addition of two different preparations of TSP-1 to recombinant small latent TGF-beta1 in the test tube resulted in only a very small increase in the proportion of the TGF-beta1 able to bind to the TGF-beta type II receptor: from 0.1% to a maximum of 0.4%. This small effect was not specific for TSP-1: matrix metalloproteinase 2, tissue inhibitor of matrix metalloproteinase 2 and active plasminogen activator inhibitor 1, but not transglutaminase, human serum albumin or immunoglobulin, had quantitatively similar effects on latent TGF-beta1. Furthermore, no change in the activity associated with small latent TGF-beta1 was noted in either mink lung epithelial cell or rat aortic smooth-muscle cell culture systems in the presence of TSP-1 (or TSP-1-derived peptides). We conclude that TSP-1, either alone or in the presence of cultured smooth-muscle cells (a cell type known to activate latent TGF-beta in vitro and in vivo) is unable to activate latent TGF-beta1. Any TSP-mediated activation of TGF-beta1 must depend on additional factor(s) not present in our systems.


Social Studies of Science | 2012

Drawing a line: Setting guidelines for digital image processing in scientific journal articles

Emma Frow

The widespread use of digital image-processing software to prepare images for publication is a matter of growing unease among journal editors, particularly in the biosciences. Concerned not so much with intentional fraud, but rather with routine and ‘innocent’ yet inappropriate alteration of digital images, several high-profile science journals have recently introduced guidelines for authors regarding image manipulation, and are implementing in-house forensic procedures for screening submitted images. Such interventions can be seen as an attempt to ‘draw a line’ for the scientific community regarding acceptable and unacceptable practices in image production. However, in trying to define simple best-practice guidelines for digital image processing, these journals raise – perhaps inadvertently – a number of longstanding ambiguities concerning the role of images in the production and communication of scientific knowledge. This paper draws on recent image-processing guidelines and journal commentaries to analyse four key tensions relating to the production, circulation and interpretation of digital images in scientific publications. By examining where and how journal editors are drawing lines with respect to image-making practices, this case study explores how trust, the distribution of authority and accountability, and the nature of objectivity are being (re-)negotiated in the digital age.


Engineering Studies | 2013

‘Can simple biological systems be built from standardized interchangeable parts?’ Negotiating biology and engineering in a synthetic biology competition

Emma Frow; Jane Calvert

Synthetic biology represents a recent attempt to bring engineering principles and practices to working with biology. In practice, the nature of the relationship between engineering and biology in synthetic biology is a subject of ongoing debate. The disciplines of biology and engineering are typically seen to involve different ways of knowing and doing, and to embody different assumptions and objectives. Tensions between these approaches are playing out as the field of synthetic biology is being established. Here, we study negotiations between engineering and biology through the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition. This undergraduate competition has been important in launching and bootstrapping the field of synthetic biology, and serves as a test-bed for the engineering approach. We show how a number of issues that iGEM teams must grapple with – including standardization, design, intellectual property, and the imagination of the social – involve the negotiation of engineering, biology, and other disciplines (including computer science), in ways more complex than the engineering rhetoric of synthetic biology implies. We suggest that a new moral economy for synthetic biology is being created, in which epistemic and institutional values, conventions, and practices are being negotiated and (re)defined.


Journal of Responsible Innovation | 2016

Five rules of thumb for post-ELSI interdisciplinary collaborations

Andrew Balmer; Jane Calvert; Claire Marris; Susan Molyneux-Hodgson; Emma Frow; Matthew Kearnes; Kate Bulpin; Pablo Schyfter; Adrian Mackenzie; Paul Martin

In this paper we identify five rules of thumb for interdisciplinary collaboration across the natural and social sciences. We link these to efforts to move away from the ‘ethical, legal and social issues’ framework of interdisciplinarity and towards a post-ELSI collaborative space. It is in trying to open up such a space that we identify the need for: collaborative experimentation, taking risks, collaborative reflexivity, opening-up discussions of unshared goals and neighbourliness.


Science, Technology, & Human Values | 2013

Classifying, Constructing, and Identifying Life Standards as Transformations of “The Biological”

Adrian Mackenzie; Claire Waterton; Rebecca Ellis; Emma Frow; Ruth McNally; Lawrence Busch; Brian Wynne

Recent accounts of “the biological” emphasize its thoroughgoing transformation. Accounts of biomedicalization, biotechnology, biopower, biocapital, and bioeconomy tend to agree that twentieth- and twenty-first-century life sciences transform the object of biology, the biological. Amidst so much transformation, we explore attempts to stabilize the biological through standards. We ask: how do standards handle the biological in transformation? Based on ethnographic research, the article discusses three contemporary postgenomic standards that classify, construct, or identify biological forms: the Barcoding of Life Initiative, the BioBricks Assembly Standard, and the Proteomics Standards Initiative. We rely on recent critical analyses of standardization to suggest that any attempt to attribute a fixed property to the biological actually multiplies dependencies between values, materials, and human and nonhuman agents. We highlight ways in which these biological standards cross-validate life forms with forms of life such as publics, infrastructures, and forms of disciplinary compromise. Attempts to standardize the biological, we suggest, offer a good way to see how a life form is always also a form of life.


Journal of Responsible Innovation | 2018

A roadmap for gene drives: using institutional analysis and development to frame research needs and governance in a systems context

Jennifer Kuzma; Fred Gould; Zachary Brown; James P. Collins; Jason Delborne; Emma Frow; Kevin M. Esvelt; David H. Guston; Caroline M. Leitschuh; Kenneth A. Oye; S. Stauffer

ABSTRACTThe deployment of gene drives is emerging as an alternative for protecting endangered species, controlling agricultural pests, and reducing vector-borne diseases. This paper reports on a workshop held in February 2016 to explore the complex intersection of political, economic, ethical, and ecological risk issues associated with gene drives. Workshop participants were encouraged to use systems thinking and mapping to describe the connections among social, policy, economic, and ecological variables as they intersect within governance systems. In this paper, we analyze the workshop transcripts and maps using the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework to categorize variables associated with gene drive governance and account for the complexities of socio-ecological systems. We discuss how the IAD framework can be used in the future to test hypotheses about how features of governance systems might lead to certain outcomes and inform the design of research programs, public engagement, and...


Engineering Studies | 2013

GUEST EDITORIAL: Synthetic biology: Making biology into an engineering discipline

Pablo Schyfter; Emma Frow; Jane Calvert

With this special issue, we hope to open up a conversation with readers of Engineering Studies about the emerging field of synthetic biology. Despite the name synthetic biology, the guiding ambition of practitioners in this field is to turn biology into an engineering discipline by bringing engineering principles and practices from more established fields of engineering into the world of biotechnology.1 There is a rich and growing body of critical literature on synthetic biology, but it has yet to engage substantially with engineering studies. This collection of papers strives to open up a set of questions for reflection and empirical investigation in what we see as an intriguing space emerging in the interstices between science studies and engineering studies. The term ‘synthetic biology’ can be traced back to the early twentieth century,2 but the past 10–15 years have seen a concerted attempt to forge a new discipline around a particular understanding of how to work with biology.3 Although practitioners and observers alike refer to synthetic biology in ways that capture a variety of research trajectories,4 the dominant strand – and our focus in this collection of papers – draws heavily on existing engineering, defining synthetic biology as ‘the design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems’, and ‘the re-design of existing, natural biological systems for useful purposes’.5 Proponents of synthetic biology distinguish their work from the genetic engineering methods that have been developed over the past 40 years and typically describe genetic engineering as an ad hoc, craft-like practice, rather than ‘proper’ engineering.6 Synthetic biologists position themselves as building an enterprise that will deliver where genetic engineering has failed. This estrangement from established science serves to demarcate synthetic biology and assert its novelty. It also works as a rallying cry and mission statement: synthetic biology will ‘make biology easier to engineer.’ Synthetic biologists routinely refer to a set of ‘engineering principles’7 that inform and structure their goals and methods. More generally, these principles underlie a particular philosophy of practice and support a set of normative commitments. Core among the engineering principles identified is abstraction,8 the pragmatic simplification of complexity and the use of representational tools to facilitate design practices. Synthetic biologists also emphasize the modularity9 of biological systems and see this characteristic as enabling the construction of functional biological parts10 (typically DNA sequences that encode


Methods in Microbiology | 2013

Social Dimensions of Microbial Synthetic Biology

Jane Calvert; Emma Frow

Abstract In this chapter, we outline a number of foundational ideas that underpin our approach to the study of the social, ethical, legal and philosophical dimensions of synthetic biology. We describe these through a series of important shifts that have taken place over the past few decades of social science research. We suggest a move away from discussions centred around ethical ‘implications’, speculations about the future and concerns about risk, regulation and public acceptance, towards a conversation that talks in terms of social ‘dimensions’, anticipating the future, managing uncertainty, tools of governance and research for the public good. We argue that these seemingly subtle changes in vocabulary open up a new and productive space for thinking about the social dimensions of synthetic biology.

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Jane Calvert

University of Edinburgh

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Brian Garvey

University of Strathclyde

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Kate Bulpin

University of Manchester

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Paul Martin

University of Sheffield

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Matthew Kearnes

University of New South Wales

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