Matthew Kearnes and Matthias Wienroth

Abstract

Over the last half-century a range of new research programmes has come to dominate public and policy discussion of the nature of scientific and technological innovation. Cybernetics and systems research, followed by information and bio-technologies, and latterly areas such as nanotechnology and synthetic biology have emerged as new and interdisciplinary technoscientific programmes. Though often presented in technical terms - as epistemic developments within hitherto disconnected fields - such programmes are also typically established through forms of state sponsorship and strategic coordination. Fuelled by a range of strategic concerns, the emergence and development of research programmes in areas such as nanotechnology and synthetic biology have become archetypal sites for innovation in scientific governance.

This paper begins from a simple proposition - how might we understand the emergence and consolidation of research programmes in nanotechnology and synthetic biology symmetrically? That is: how might we attend to the constitution of the emergence of new research communities and objects in both epistemic and political terms?

Through an analysis of UK science and research policy we develop a narrative account of contemporary technoscientific governance. In particular, we explore the circulation of a range of problematic narratives that inform the development of science policy priorities and programmes. These narratives draw on wider discourses concerning both knowledge-based innovation and risk-based precaution in the context of pre-existing institutional structures and perceptions of national needs and capabilities to address these. Modes of argumentation implicit to contemporary science policy suggest that mechanisms of research support and coordination are one key instrument with which nations address strategic problems - the future of the nation, the future of democracy and the future of society itself. Informed by a range of overlapping theories of innovation and technological development, these narratives operate both symbolically and instrumentally. Accordingly, we suggest that they are deployed, and must be interpreted, in light of a discursively complex institutional landscape in which the role of the state in coordinating the emergence of new research programmes is mediated by a range of intermediary organisations. 

Matthew Kearnes and Matthias Wienroth

Department of Geography, Durham University

m.b.kearnes@durham.ac.uk

Tiago Moreira

Over the past two decades, the growth of public interest in the biotechnological approaches to the 'problem of aging' has been sustained not only by shifts in the biogerontological knowledge base  but also by scientists' appeals for rethinking the organisation of ageing research itself.  According to these scientists, as the US Alliance for Aging Research put it in 2005, 'the aging research field [is] on the threshold of a new way of thinking-shifting from a focus on specific age-related illnesses to a search for an understanding of aging itself'. This new 'aging research agenda', channelled through science policy platforms such as the House of Lords S&T Committee and consultations on public attitudes toward research into the causes of ageing, explicitly proposes a new articulation between 'society' and biogerontology.

This paper focuses on the emergence of this articulation and analyses how its development and mode of governance diverged between the US and the UK. The paper suggests two dimensions through which this difference can be understood: how technological innovation and expectations in this domain are framed and the devices used to manage them; how the linkage between technological expectations and changes in the rights and obligations of different age strata within contemporary societies is produced in different contexts. 

Tiago Moreira

Durham University

tiago.moreira@durham.ac.uk

Martina Merz

A central concern of current science policy, that academic science benefits industry, has been taken up by universities and public research organizations. This is especially so for the case of emerging technologies such as nanotechnology. In this context, a specific organizational form has come to the fore: the technological platform. These instrumental facilities provide scientific and technological equipment and expertise (various forms of microscopy, specimen preparation, micro- and nanolithography, characterization, etc.), the corresponding personnel, and dedicated work environments (e.g. clean rooms). In the realm of micro- and nanotechnology, technological platforms, typically serving both academic and industrial users, have been promoted with the promise that they foster new forms of academia-industry cooperation and partnership, the intensified ties being seen as constitutive for the emergence and consolidation of these research fields. This paper investigates how technological platforms participate in framing science-industry activities. On the basis of a comparative analysis of three publicly funded technological platforms in Switzerland, it shows that they relate distinctly to academic and to industrial users. The paper then discusses how technological platforms reconfigure the science-economy divide. While the observed platforms provide new institutional contact and interaction between academia and industry, new research collaboration does not necessarily materialize in practice. In this respect science-industry mediation by way of technological platforms does not make science-industry boundaries more porous. Instead, the declared openness of public research with respect to industry, in the case of technological platforms, may contribute to maintain public science's autonomy.

Martina Merz

Institute of Sociology

University of Lucerne

martina.merz@unilu.ch