Ruth McNally

Promoting coherent minimum reporting guidelines for biological and biomedical investigations: the MIBBI project

The Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations (MIBBI) project aims to foster the coordinated development of minimum-information checklists and provide a resource for those exploring the range of extant checklists.

Articulating Scientific Practice with PROTEE: STS, Loyalties, and the Limits of Reflexivity

Scientific knowledge is the outcome of a collective, for example, of experts, methods, equipment, and experimental sites. The configuration of the collective shapes the scientific findings, allowing some interactions to become visible and meaningful at the expense of others. PROTEE is a methodology that aims to increase the reflexivity of research and innovation projects by helping to sensitize practitioners to the demarcations their projects enact and to think through how these may affect the relevance of the outcomes. We used PROTEE to structure a series of dialogues with a research project that wanted its findings to make a contribution to the heated debate on transgenic trees. Through this process, the project did indeed become more articulated while we ourselves became engaged with the project in a very particular way, by becoming loyal to it. The dialogues also made the risks that engagement with public debate entails for scientists very apparent. Like us, the scientific project chose its loyalties, but what PROTEE did was to help make these explicit.

Bio-patenting and Innovation: Nomads of the Present and a New Global Order

In The Consequences of Modernity (1990) Anthony Giddens characterises the present time as ‘late modernity’ or ‘high modernity’, rather than post-modernity. For Giddens, the essence of modernity is its dynamism — a dynamism of such pace and scope as to be discontinuous with traditional social orders. He argues that one characteristic of modernity is the emergence of four institutions: capitalism, industrialism, surveillance and military power. Figure 10.1 sets out these four basic institutional dimensions of modernity and indicates their interrelations. Innovations in science and technology generate utopian and dystopian expectations, which are sources of dynamism for each of these institutions. For industrialism, such innovations suggest new ways of controlling nature; for capitalism, new avenues of capitalist expansion; for surveillance, more penetrating technologies of observation and monitoring; and for military power, new ways of perpetrating violence. Elsewhere, we have applied Giddens’s framework to analyse how utopian and dystopian expectations of genetic engineering are shaping modernity (see Wheale and McNally, 1994; McNally and Wheale, 1994).

Doing research, creating impact: using ‘PROTEE’ to learn from a genetically modified tree field trial

If a research project is to achieve its intended impacts, it must learn to become sensitive to the public context it implicitly assumes and enacts. This article presents a case study in which we used the perspectives provided by the ‘PROTEE’ methodology to create an opportunity to explore, and to reflect on, the reality in which research on genetically modified trees was expected to make a difference. Identifying potential barriers to persuasive communication brought out additional capacities and limitations of the research strategy. Paradoxically the very same strategic choices which had allowed the research project to claim its policy-relevance ended up undermining its public role. Since PROTEE can help making such contradictions explicit, we claim that it has much to offer to research management. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Sociomics: CESAGen Multidisciplinary Workshop on the Transformation of Knowledge Production in the Biosciences, and its Consequences 23–24 July, 2007 Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, UK

On 23 and 24 July, 2007, the Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (CESAGen) held its first sociomics workshop at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, UK. The topic was transformation of knowledge production. Participants included social scientists together with those working on different elements of the proteomics knowledge production‐line, including core facilities, data repositories, large‐scale projects, MS, search engines, reference databases, standardisation and public funding. Recurrent motifs included gear‐heads, black boxes, uncertainty and getting back to biology.

Genetic engineering and environmental protection: a framework for regulatory evaluation

Drawing primarily on the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP) report on the release of genetically engineered organisms (1989) and the report of the European Parliaments Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Protection, the authors identify and define 10 key elements of legislation which are important for the protection of the environment from the risks arising from the deliberate release of genetically engineered organisms. These elements are then used as a framework to evaluate the regulatory provisions of proposed and existing UK governmental controls. These controls are also compared with those in the new EC Directive on the deliberate release of genetically engineered organisms. The conclusions are that the existing and proposed UK provisions are lacking in their ability to protect the environment from the risks of the deliberate release of genetically engineered organisms.