Prof. Vural Özdemir
(Editor-in-Chief, OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology): Erik, many thanks for your time and this interview for OMICS. The journal is an interdisciplinary forum dedicated to systems medicine and integrative biology with a legacy over two decades. Our editorial scope spans from “cell to society.” In this context, responsible innovation (RI) has come to prominence over the last decade in particular. Many funding agencies and science policies in industrialized societies are asking scientists to reflect on the broader outcomes of science, technology, and innovation. I am aware the definitions for RI vary as with the terminologies. However, it would be useful to start with a definition. Could you offer your own definition of RI for the OMICS readership?
Prof. Erik Fisher:
Thank you, Vural, for inviting me to participate in this interview. As you know, I have followed this journal for some time now and applaud its interdisciplinary approach to the science–society nexus. It is therefore a real pleasure to be discussing this topic with you now.
In my view, RI is an ideal aspiration for the process of governing emerging technologies in society. Like several of its predecessors, this aspiration points to the challenging yet urgent need to combine distinct, sometimes conflicting values and categories that are normally treated separately in modern societies and their institutions. RI is an expression of the need to integrate the promotion and regulation of scientific and technological novelty and its development and dissemination. Importantly, RI recognizes that the governance of science and technology is a society-wide endeavor that cannot be limited to governmental control, scientific autonomy, or privatization. In short, it requires scientific and innovation processes to be continually responsive to a wide variety of societal inputs, signals, and values.
Prof. Özdemir:
As you have recently written, political philosophers from Plato onward suggested that questions about the social use, purpose, and relevance of science cannot be answered by science. Indeed, these questions pertain to RI research and the study of human values enacting on scientific practices. As RI research is becoming a requirement by funding agencies, how will the laboratory practices and societal roles of scientists change?
Prof. Fisher:
That's the real question: how effective will RI be at cultivating the principles of reflexivity and responsiveness within core science and innovation enterprises? The fact that governments, research councils, and some industrial organizations have taken up the rhetoric of RI is indeed promising; but unless they take risks and learn from the current experiments, we simply won't be able to develop the necessary individual and institutional capacities to effectively integrate RI principles into science and innovation.
To this end, my research group has worked with dozens of academic and industrial laboratories around the world to determine what is appropriate to ask scientists and engineers to do differently in response to growing demands for RI. We've learned that one of the most effective things they can do is to simply pay more attention to the social dimensions in the scientific choices that they are already making. In our experience, working collaboratively with philosophers and social scientists to map the values and alternatives inherent in technical decisions can help scientists be more creative and at the same time respond to broader social and ethical concerns.
Prof. Özdemir:
Past strands of research on emerging technology governance and “societal implications” have tended to follow narrowly framed methodologies, often bracketing out concerns on politics, human values, and power relationships inherent in scientific practice. Could you highlight some of the distinctive or defining features of the RI approach to emerging technology governance?
Prof. Fisher:
I agree with you about that, and of course that is one of the reasons why I believe RI has the potential to build a stronger foundation for governance. As I just mentioned, interdisciplinary collaboration is one of the essential characteristics of the approaches to RI that I find to be most potent. While we have a long way to go in terms of making sure that both social scientists and natural scientists feel that they have something to contribute to science and innovation efforts, the fact remains that this radical integrative ideal is baked into the RI concept. In addition, RI is not confined to one realm of the science and innovation process, but attempts to work at multiple levels, time frames, and decision-making sites. Thus, its principles can and should be incorporated during science and technology promotion, research practices, and governmental regulation. As you know, I like to think of these as upstream, midstream, and downstream stages of innovation.
Prof. Özdemir:
As with engineering sciences, the medical field is highly solution oriented. This has the potential to trump the normative dimension (e.g., responsible/irresponsible) of medical innovations. Could you direct our readers to the latest RI analysis tools, particularly for the medical doctors, nurses, and other healthcare staff interested in analyzing new health innovations through the lens of RI?
Prof. Fisher:
A good place to start is the report Gray Matters: Integrative Approaches for Neuroscience, Ethics, and Society published by the U.S. Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. In it, they consider four different approaches to integrating normative dimensions into scientific teams working at the interface of neuroscience, including biomedical research. Another resource is found in several contributions to the Journal of Responsible Innovation special issue on technology assessment; for instance, Michael Decker and colleagues discuss how “demand analysis” can help translate user and other “nontechnical” considerations into expert healthcare and caregiving settings in the case of assistive technologies for people living with dementia. [Decker M, Weinberger N, Krings B-J, Hirsch J. (2017). Imagined technology futures in demand-oriented technology assessment. J Responsible Innov 4, 177–196.]
I should also add that my own collaborations with biomedical researchers have resulted in several efforts, including the use of future scenarios and interdisciplinary collaborations such as discussed here [Fisher E, Boenink M, Van Der Burg S, Woodbury N. (2012). Responsible healthcare innovation: anticipatory governance of nanodiagnostics for theranostics medicine. Expert Rev Mol Diagn 12, 857–870].
Prof. Özdemir:
You have developed the Socio-Technical Integration Research (STIR) Project for governance of emerging technologies. Are there striking recent examples of RI that you wish to share?
Prof. Fisher:
The STIR process opens up science and engineering research and development practices to societal reflection in real time. Rather than asking scientists to think about societal aspects that are far removed from their science, it helps them see their research from the perspectives of multiple stakeholders, which in turn helps them make more creative and socially responsible decisions. And this is not just theory: we have documented the practical effects of incorporating STIR into scientific, engineering, and management practices in a series of coordinated studies. For instance, the directors of laboratories in North America, Europe, and Asia and I wrote in a short piece in Nature that reflections on RI generated novel research ideas. In other studies, our scientific collaborators have stated that their projects would have been completely different if they had not engaged in weekly reflections using the STIR protocol. In other words, STIR is more than “talking about ethics”—it also adds value to the scientific research itself.
Prof. Özdemir:
Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts on RI with the OMICS readership, and reaching out to integrative biologists and biomedical scientists, physicians, nurses, and health professionals. Your biography is available at the end of this interview for the interested readers who may want to learn more on RI. Any final thoughts you wish to add?
Prof. Fisher
: Thanks again, Vural, for your work in OMICS and for reaching out to the RI community and scholarship. I would encourage your readers to think about how the principles of RI—anticipation, inclusiveness, reflexivity, and responsiveness—can be more explicitly incorporated into their research, education, and entrepreneurial efforts. I would also encourage them to document, discuss, and debate the possibility and utility of doing so in the field of integrative biology and medical innovation within the pages of this journal.
