The InSIS BioProperty research group invites you to its forthcoming seminar series on property rights in the biosciences. The series explores the changing landscape of intellectual property rights in biomedical research. Should human embryonic stem cells be patentable? Can we use ‘Open Source’ models to advance research in synthetic biology? Do property rights hinder the ability of research groups to collaborate? How can we ensure equitable access to biomedical products and services? The speakers include experts from the field of law, public policy and the social sciences.
‘Legal and ethical perspectives on property rights in human biological material’
Nils Hoppe, CELLS, Leibniz Universität Hannover
24 January
4:00–5:30pm
64 BanburyRoad
‘Building a patent systemin the public interest? Making democracy, the economy, and morality in the United States and Europe’
Shobita Parthasarathy, Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan
31 January
4:00–5:30pm
64 Banbury Road
‘Ownership in the contemporary life sciences’
Justine Pila, Faculty of Law, University ofOxford
07 February
4:00–5:30pm
64 Banbury Road
‘Why we do not own our bodies’
Anne Phillips, Gender Institute and Government Department, London School of Economics
14 February
4:00–5:30pm
64 Banbury Road
‘Between use and exchange in bioeconomy’
Nik Brown, Department of Sociology, University of York
21 February
4:00–5:30pm
64 Banbury Road
‘Ownership and sharing in synthetic biology: a ‘diverse ecology’ of the open and the proprietary?’
Jane Calvert, ESRC Innogen Centre,
University of Edinburgh
28 February
4:00–5:30pm
64 Banbury Road
Feel free to download the poster. All welcome!
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Noortje Marres and I have edited a special section of the journal Economy and Society dedicated to Materials and Devices of the Public. The papers (by Gay Hawkins, Sarah Whatmore & Catharina Landström, Javier Lezaun, and Noortje Marres) explore the role of things, devices and material settings in facilitating new forms of public engagement. In the introduction, we discuss the value of an approach that treats material engagement as a distinct and explicitly political mode of performing the public.
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This fall, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, Professor at the Department of Thematic Studies at Linköping University in Sweden, visited InSIS for a couple of weeks. Dr Tanja Schneider asked what he is up to at the moment.
Claes-Fredrik, you are Professor of Technology and Social Change at the University of Linköping, Sweden, and are currently a Visiting Fellow at InSIS. What brings you to Oxford?
I’m here to do some research, meet people, write stuff, and thinking through stuff. And the secret thing is that I’m also escaping a few meetings.
Last week you gave a work-in-progress presentation about your current research, which focuses on valuation practices in medical research and I was curious to hear what got you interested in the topic initially?
I have for a very long time wanted to develop ways to examine how the economic is intertwined with scientific practice and the shaping of technology. Both because I think it is important, and because I think it is something that has not received sufficient attention within STS. I have grappled with how to do that and previously did work on the every day management and coordination of clinical large trials. When I did that work I also tried to investigate the economic aspects of large trials, for instance, how physicians are remunerated for recruiting patients but this was a bit difficult.
I have been thinking for quite a while that maybe the design of large clinical trials could be an interesting place because there appear to be many calculations involved; calculations that are both scientific calculations but also calculations about the costing of trials such as how much you can spend on it and maybe also about the commercial possibilities. That was more of an unpolished idea for quite some time but then Francis Lee was recruited into a position to work with me on questions about the design of research, and then we developed this research project together into a few different grant applications which we are still waiting to hear if they will be funded or not.* It’s been a long, abstract journey in terms of wanting to investigate the topic of science and economic practice but the development of this particular project is the result of perhaps one and a half years or so and we worked most hard on developing it this spring by writing grant applications.
So what will be your site of study? Where will you explore these issues?
Francis will look at experiments related to biomarkers and I will focus on the design of large randomized controlled trials (RCTs). We are currently investigating different possible sites and have some contacts already with people involved in clinical trials as well as experiments related to biomarkers. We both intend to do some of the fieldwork in the UK.
Can you say a bit more about how you will go about studying how the economic is intertwined with scientific practices.
We are planning to look at a few different experiments – or rather the design phase of these experiments – and we plan to do repeated interviews with those involved in the design efforts. One part of the exercise is thus to investigate who is involved in this work: maybe there is an investigator, a sponsor, representatives of patient organisations that can be involved but that has to be an empirical question. So, the methodology will be repeated interviews following the design process, which can take a few months or half a year, sometimes even longer. Hopefully, we will also be able to sit in on meetings where different kinds of designs are discussed.
It sounds like you are focusing on a laboratory site primarily. In how far do you plan to also consider/research how potentially other sites beyond the laboratory – I’m thinking, for instance, of Research Council’s and their annual research priorities and their grant evaluation practices – are intertwined with valuation practices in the laboratory?
I guess we have to start somewhere, where we think that the centre of this design work is going on but of course there is presumably a lot of stuff that is influencing and involved in that process. In our interviews done for preparing the grant applications, we have also begun asking about what kinds of tools are used, such as tools with the standard costing figures that contains a black-boxed kind of valuation. These come from somewhere and we have to make a reasonable attempt to investigate where this stuff comes from and what influence they have. And, of course, if it is a trial sponsored by a pharmaceutical company, how they evaluate different aspects of a trial. So probably there are several sites involved in a single design. And from what I understand there is a lot of emailing and teleconferencing going on as well. Hence there is no single point in time or space where the design is made. That are simultaneously interesting and challenging aspects of this topic.
While you are visiting InSIS you are also involved with organizing a workshop…
…yes, on the 21st of October a group came from the University of Linköping, Sweden, Tema T, the unit were I work – technology and social change – to visit InSIS. The visiting group of about ten to 15 people is part of a research programme called ValueS, which stands for Science, Technology and Valuation practices, and we are interested in STS and valuation as a practice. The purpose of the InSIS-ValueS meeting is to discuss each other’s research, explore ways to collaborate and establish regular exchange between the two groups. And we actually have a specific site for this meeting!
What else are you currently working on?
I’m finishing up an old paper, which I wrote about the study of the everyday coordination of large trials. What else? I’m working on a book proposal for an edited volume on value practices in life science, which is a volume that brings together different contributions from different aspects of life science, from different researchers. We have 13 contributions. So, I’m working on the book proposal with Francis Lee and Isabelle Dussauge, my co-editors from Sweden, who will also come to Oxford for the InSIS-ValueS meeting.
Did you find some time to explore Oxford so far? How are you finding it?
I’m finding it very nice and I’m enjoying it a lot. The weather has been good and the dining has been excellent. And I have a nice jog along the Thames in the mornings. It’s perfect.
It’s great to hear that you enjoy Oxford. Thank you very much for the interview!
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* In the meantime, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson and Francis Lee have received research funding from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond for 3,5 MSEK [appr £ 325.000] for their research project “Trials of Value”. Congratulations!
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With the start of a new project on BioProperty: Biomedical Research and the Future of Property Rights, InSIS welcomes a number of new colleagues. The latest addition to the team is Catherine Montgomery, who recently joined us from the University of York. Malte Ziewitz visited Catherine in her new office.
Congratulations on your new job, and welcome to Oxford. What were your first impressions when you arrived three weeks ago?
Thanks. Thinking about the constant stream of new people, places, ideas, discussions, connections and cultures I’ve encountered over the past few weeks makes it quite tricky to construct a coherent narrative about ‘first’ impressions! One impression is that Oxford is very much alive and charged with intellectual provocations. I’ve been struck, in particular, by the location of InSIS within the Said Business School and within Oxford. On the outside, you have a smooth, shiny building – on the inside, corridors bristling with barbed and unblunted ideas. Likewise, superficially, there’s the Oxford one might imagine – ancient, traditional, made of solid walls and foundations…but within it, you find the STS group, where people are chipping away both at the foundations of knowledge and its ceiling, studying everything from neuromarketing to transgenic mice. It feels like an exciting place to be. When I first fell into academia, I rationalized it on the basis that I didn’t want to contribute to profit-making and I didn’t want to work ‘in an office’. So finding myself in a beautiful steel and glass office at a business school makes for an intriguing relocation!
So what exactly are you going to work on?
I will be working with Javier Lezaun and Amy Hinterberger on a project exploring the contested nature and the future of intellectual property rights in biomedical research. The biosciences are increasingly giving rise to entities that resist a straightforward categorisation as property, including high-profile developments such as cloning, biobanks, transpecies transplantation, hybrids, chimeras, and stem cell reprogramming. The study of property in relation to these ‘innovations’ raises all sorts of questions about the social management of the boundaries between the animal and the human, life and death, the public and the private. By bringing these new forms of life into the world, the life sciences are challenging the limits of intellectual property and disrupting traditional jurisprudence on private appropriation. In this project, we’ll be exploring the contemporary dynamics of private and common property through a number of case studies, including stem cell patenting and the use of transgenic research mice. We’ll also be looking at changing organizational forms of scientific research in relation to ‘neglected diseases’, such as patent pools and the introduction of open-source components in public-private partnerships. By studying these developments ethnographically, we should be able to shed light on how they are reconfiguring flows of information, materials and knowledge in the biosciences, and generating new forms of governance and accountability.
Will this be an entirely theoretical study or are you also planning in doing some empirical work?
In order to develop a novel analytical framework for understanding reconfigurations of property, we need to observe actual property practices in biomedical research. Broad generalizations can only take you so far – and, as far as capturing current shifts in biomedical research rights goes – not far enough. So we will anchor our theoretical advances in close ethnographic observation of the fields of innovation just mentioned (transgenic mice, stem cells and R&D for neglected diseases). This will enable us to answer questions we simply could not fathom by sitting at our desks alone; for example, how does the use of a living patent, such as the OncoMouse, affect scientists’ knowledge-making practices? How are legal strategies embedded in the day-to-day practices and infrastructures of stem cell research? Through which material relations is intellectual property shared and accessed in an ‘open lab’ developing drugs for neglected diseases? Our empirical research will take us from patent offices to labs to ‘virtual’ research coordination sites, and provide detailed material for a comparative analysis informed by theoretical insights from STS, economic sociology and legal studies.
OK, so do you already have a specific field site in mind?
The short answer is: not yet. We’re still in the early stages of fieldwork discussions, and there are a number of avenues to explore. I am hoping to study property configurations in a global product development partnership (PDP) spanning Europe and Africa, which would build on my previous research looking at transnational clinical trials. PDPs for ‘neglected diseases’ are curious hybrids, often describing themselves as virtual institutions, and linking highly distributed and culturally diverse material sites, from pharmaceutical company offices to university labs to clinical trial sites and beyond. Studying property ethnographically in such an ‘unbounded field’ will be an interesting methodological challenge.
Looking at your biography, it strikes me that you have been very successful at linking research and “fieldwork” on the one hand with activism and “working in the field” on the other. Is this something you would like to continue here at InSIS?
I don’t know about activism, but I did initially get into the field of HIV research through a desire to shake up the status quo (and thereby, implicitly, improve it) through critical social research. If success is measured in terms simply of fieldwork opportunities, then working in a school of public health was a very successful place to pursue this. However, studying a field you are also working in has its problems – I think Emily Martin once referred to it as like trying to push a bus in which you are also travelling. It goes back to the well-rehearsed debate as to the compatibility of ‘commitment’ with radical epistemological relativism, a tension which seems particularly acute when you bring STS sensibilities to bear on issues like HIV and malaria in low-income countries. After grappling with this in the public health arena, I’m quite glad to step away for a while and pursue some (perhaps) more theoretical and philosophical questions from the other side of the fence. I think InSIS will provide an excellent intellectual location from which to do this.
So welcome again, and thank you for your thoughts.
Thanks!
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While at InSIS I worked upon two case studies as part of the Oxford eSocial Science project. The first case study was an ethnography of a very successful computer lab in London. They have been creating middle-ware programmes for hosting visualisations online. These visualisations render academic, publicly available or crowd-sourced information in an interactive format – from the (near) real-time availability of Barclay’s bikes in London to the latest UK census or crime statistics from the Metropolitan Police Service. I explored the tension in the work involving code that must be balanced for the success of such e-research labs. New and innovative types of data are being mashed-up in visualisations, but this creativity is coupled to ad hoc programming on the part of each individual programmer. Rather than focus upon the data, care must be given to ‘code curatorial’ practices to sustain these platforms.
The second case study was a timely study of Twitter. Much discussed and perhaps overly hyped as a means for network mobilisation during recent political upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and here in London (and greater UK) during the past riots, Twitter is emerging as a reservoir for data mining by academics, politicos, the private industry and others. (The Guardian, for example, now employs a team to study Twitter). With a colleague at a lab that harvests the ‘back-end’ of social media platforms, I co-authored a paper on the ethical implications of such research. A bit contentiously, we urge a levelling of ourselves with those we study through making ourselves equally vulnerable to potential data-mining. The paper is now available at Taylor and Francis.
Abstract
“In this paper, the authors examine some of the implications of born-digital research environments by discussing the emergence of data mining and the analysis of social media platforms. With the rise of individual online activity in chat rooms, social networking sites and micro-blogging services, new repositories for social science research have become available in large quantities. Given the changes of scale that accompany such research, both in terms of data mining and the communication of results, the authors term this type of research ‘massified research’. This article argues that while the private and commercial processing of these new massive data sets is far from unproblematic, the use by academic practitioners poses particular challenges with respect to established ethical protocols. These involve reconfigurations of the external relations between researchers and participants, as well as the internal relations that compose the identities of the participant, the researcher and that of the data. Consequently, massified research and its outputs operate in a grey area of undefined conduct with respect to these concerns. The authors work through the specific case study of using Twitter’s public Application Programming Interface for research and visualization. To conclude, this article proposes some potential best practices to extend current procedures and guidelines for such massified research. Most importantly, the authors develop these under the banner of ‘agile ethics’. The authors conclude by making the counterintuitive suggestion that researchers make themselves as vulnerable to potential data mining as the subjects who comprise their data sets: a parity of practice.“
Continue reading the full paper at Information, Communication and Society.
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The Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities, University of Oxford, presents a series of three lectures with distinguished academics whose inspirational work has contributed significantly to our understanding of contemporary cities and societies. The first distinguished lecturer will be Prof Jennifer Robinson from the Department of Geography, University College London:
Cities in a World of Cities: traces of elsewhere in the making of city futures
8 November 2011, 5–6.30pm
Edmond Safra Lecture Theatre
Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
Prof Jennifer Robinson examines what must be considered in the making of city futures. Under conditions of globalisation, city futures are imagined in the context of a wider world of cities: policy making for cities is profoundly internationalised. And in the wake of vast changes where urbanisation is taking place across the globe, scholars must now theorise the contemporary urban condition with reference to a world of diverse cities. Both require new vocabularies and new ways of working with traces of elsewhere as city futures are re-imagined: for policy makers to operate at the complex interface between circulating policies and local political contestations, and for scholars to revitalise and invent comparative and international ways of doing research.
About the speaker
Jennifer Robinson has published widely in urban geography: on the politics of segregation in South African cities (The Power of Apartheid, Butterworth-Heinemann, 1996), on urban development in post-apartheid cities, and, more generally, her book, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (Routledge: 2006) established a post-colonial critique of urban studies, arguing for urban theory to draw on the diversity of urban experiences across the globe in developing more general accounts of cities.
This even is free but registration is required. We kindly request you register your interest here.
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Just in case you are still looking for something to read this weekend, a Special Issue of Encounters has just been published. Edited by Brit Ross Winthereik, Peter A. Lutz, Lucy Suchman and Helen Verran, the Special Issue collects six contributions on the challenge of “Attending to Screens and Screenness”. While the object of interest (“the screen”) might seem straightforward, the authors develop a range of puzzling insights from some very interesting empirical materials. So if you can be tempted by stories about a raid on a Danish pizzeria, Californian wildfires, the Transmilenio of Bogotá, “problematic” Danish children, an energy control room, travelling researchers or online patient feedback, make sure you have a look.
My own contribution tackles the research-practical question of “How to attend to screens?” and turns on some recent themes in STS around ontology, technology and the notion of enactment. Here is the abstract:
In this paper, I explore the question of how to attend to screens. Starting from the puzzling observation that screens seem both ubiquitously present and conspicuously absent in everyday life, I find that existing studies tend to take the analytic status of screens for granted and juxtapose them with a human user to theorize the relationship between the two. In an attempt to avoid such dualisms, I turn to recent work in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and focus on how screens are being enacted in practice. However, exploring a strategy of enactment in the context of a recent ethnography of web-based patient feedback produces mixed results. Perhaps most importantly, the salience of objects is not given in enactment, but itself contingently accomplished—a process in which the role of the researcher is easily overlooked. The paper concludes that a call to attend to screens as ‘objects of interest’ may thus be better understood as an invitation to engage with people and things in situations in which the notion of ‘screens’ may (or may not) provide a useful heuristic for orienting inquiry.
Further papers by Karen Boll, Katrina Petersen, Andrés Felipe Valderrama Pineda, Helene Ratner, Antti Silvast and Jane Bjørn Vedel.
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