Nik Brown

The sociology of expectations in science and technology

In recent years a growing number of social science studies have pointed out the significance of expectations in science and technology innovation. This special issue of Technology Analysis and Stra...

A Sociology of Expectations: Retrospecting Prospects and Prospecting Retrospects

Future expectations and promises are crucial to providing the dynamism and momentum upon which so many ventures in science and technology depend. This is especially the case for pre-market applications where practical utility and value has yet to be demonstrated and where investment must be mobilised. For instance, clinical biotechnology (including a wide range of genetic therapeutic and engineering applications) has been at the centre of ferocious debates about whether or not promises and expectations will be realized. In some cases, the failure of expectations has severely damaged the reputation and credibility of professions, institutions and industry. The need for a better analytical understanding of the dynamics of expectations in innovation is both necessary and timely. This paper develops the basis for a sociology of expectations, drawing on recent writing within Science and Technology Studies (STS) and case studies of biotechnology innovation. In particular, we offer a model for understanding how expectations will predictably vary according to some key parameters. Such factors include the degree to which technologies and innovation relationships are either relatively established or newly emergent. Expectations will also vary according actors" relative closeness and involvement in knowledge production itself. The paper proceeds by analyzing the way expectations in clinical biotechnology have changed over time. That is, we compare the way the future was once represented with the way it has been represented more recently. The paper concludes by offering a means by which it is possible to map or model the situatedness of expectations".

Contested futures : a sociology of prospective techno-science

Contents: Foreword, Barbara Adam. Time, Temporality and the Social Construction of the Future: Introducing contested futures: from looking into the future to looking at the future, Nik Brown, Brian Rappert and Andrew Webster Futures of the present: from performativity to prehension, Mike Michael. Language and the Social Rhetoric of Technical Futures: Forceful futures: from promise to requirement, Harro van Lente The narrative shaping of a product creation process, J. Jasper Deuten and Arie Rip Organizing/disorganizing the breakthrough motif: Dolly the cloned ewe meets Astrid the hybrid pig, Nik Brown Talking about the future: metaphors of the internet, Sally Wyatt. Passed Futures: Lessons from failed technology futures: potholes in the road to the future, Frank W. Geels and Wim A. Smit Science fictions memory of the future, Hilary Rose. Future Science, Future Policy and the Management of Uncertainty Scripts for the future: using innovation studies to design foresight tools, Bastiaan de Laat Genetics and uncertainty, Annemiek Nelis Expectations and learning as principles for shaping the future, Luis Sanz-Menendez and Cecilia Cabello Contested health futures, Tom Ling Index.

From Bedside to Bench? Communities of Promise, Translational Research and the Making of Blood Stem Cells

Abstract Contemporary science and technology policy is concerned with improving the diffusion of knowledge from basic science into the clinic. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the emerging field of Regenerative Medicine. In this paper we critically explore the changing relationships between the bench and the bedside through the development of haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). In the history of HSCs over a 50-year period, the relationship between basic science and clinical research communities has been based on a two-way flow of knowledge; clinical innovation has played a key role in the translation process. Concepts from the sociology of expectations illuminate the ‘communities of promise’ which are formed around such emerging technologies. From this case study, we challenge assumptions underpinning many contemporary policy initiatives.

Blood Ties: Banking the Stem Cell Promise

Abstract This paper explores the banking of cord blood stem cells by new parents, a growing phenomenon that raises a number of questions for scholars interested in the role of expectations in innovation. In particular, we focus on the relationships between imagination and materiality, the way in which todays expectations of a future stem cell revolution have become embodied (materialised) in an ever-growing number of deposited cord blood samples. In addition, the case raises interesting questions about agency and authorship in the construction of the stem cell dream and the production of new ‘blood ties’—new future-oriented parental duties and responsibilities. Here, parents are encouraged to think themselves into a future in which their newborns are ‘at risk’, but also a future populated by an innovative range of regenerative medical treatments.

Capitalizing hope: the commercial development of umbilical cord blood stem cell banking

The creation of commercial cord blood banks rests on the promise of stem cell based regenerative medicine and marks the capitalization of human tissues within a future-oriented “regime of hope”. This paper will present data from a survey of the international cord blood banking industry and will explore: (a) the way firms seek to commercialize cord blood as a new set of commodities; (b) the expectations and moral economy that are being constructed around this technology; and (c) how firms are acting as mediators of hope in what might be called a “promissory bioeconomy”.

The Promissory Pasts of Blood Stem Cells

This article explores the changing expectations and contested identity of blood stem cells (haematopoietic stem cells or HSCs). While much social science critique has of late been focused on embryonic stem cells, relatively little attention has been given to the historical emergence of stem cell biology, especially the importance of blood innovation stretching back through the middle of the twentieth century and beyond. Present-day stem cell networks inherit much from the historical engagement of medical technology with blood, especially in the contexts of blood processing, bone marrow transplantation and, more recently, gene therapy. In making sense of the shaping of blood stem cells this article draws on perspectives in the ‘sociology of expectations’ in exploring the way current expectations of stem cells are historically constituted. In this way we examine the way biological entities—HSCs in this case—become the focus and bearers of future value in contemporary global stem cell economies.

Switching between Science and Culture in Transpecies Transplantation

This article discusses xenotransplantation (XTP: the surgical use of nonhuman tissues, organs, and cells for human transplantation) and examines the way its scientific promoters have defended their technology against potentially damaging public representations. The authors explore the criteria used to legitimate the selection of the pig as the best species from which to “harvest” transplant tissues in the future. The authors’ analysis shows that scientists and medical practitioners routinely switch between scientific and cultural repertoires. These repertoires enable such actors to exchange expert identities in scientific discourse for public identities in cultural discourse. These discourses map onto similarities and differences between animal donors and human hosts. Finally, the case is used to comment on a number of related approaches where the dynamics of medical and scientific authority are discussed.

Scientific citizenships: self-representations of xenotransplantation's publics.

It has now become commonplace to extol the virtues of closer relations between science and society. In an age in which scientific decision-making is characterized by chronic uncertainty, and scientific institutions are faced with deep-seated public ambivalence, the involvement of wider public constituencies in the governance of science is seen to be paramount. Yet, we might ask, what is this ‘public’? How do the members of such publics conceive of themselves as publics in relation to science? How, if at all, do they draw the distinction between science and society? And how do such distinctions enable (or otherwise) their perceived capacity to contribute to the relevant debates, indeed, to act as ‘scientific citizens’? This paper addresses these broad questions by exploring two themes concerning the relationship between the ‘public’ and scientific expertise. Much of the literature on the public understanding of science (PUS) has focused on the ways in which scientific institutions have addressed the public, and has critically examined the tacit models of the public informing such interactions. In contrast, the present paper, while certainly contributing to this analytic, also examines how members of the public represent the public itself. Through analysis of data drawn from a study of the xenotransplantation controversy, we consider how publics constitute themselves in the context of the activities of scientific institutions. The main reason that the xenotransplantation case lends itself to this sort of analysis is that it entails a number of sometimes competing scientific disciplines and regulatory actors (see Brown and Michael, 2004)—something that increasingly characterizes technoscientific and regulatory processes (e.g. Nowotny et al., 2001). As such, publics must construct themselves in relation to a complex terrain in which there is no easy contrast between ‘public’ and ‘science’. Science as Culture Vol. 14, No. 1, 39–57, March 2005

Regulating hybrids: 'Making a mess' and 'cleaning up' in tissue engineering and transpecies transplantation

This paper explores the institutional regulation of novel biosciences, hybrid technologies that often disturb and challenge existing regulatory frameworks. Developing a conceptual vocabulary for understanding the relationship between material and institutional hybrids, the paper compares human tissue engineering (TE) and xenotransplantation (XT), areas of innovation which regulators have sought to govern separately and in isolation from one another. Contrasting definitional boundaries and regulatory mechanisms partition them socio-institutionally. But despite these attempts at purification, TE and XT have proven increasingly difficult to tell apart in practical and material terms. Human and animal matters, cell cultures and tissue products have much greater corporeal connection than has been institutionally recognized, and are therefore a source of acute instability in the regulation of implants and transplants. This paper tells the story of how the messy worlds of TE and XT have leaked into one another, calling into question the abilities of regulation to adequately control hybrid innovations.