Date:
Location:
"Governance by Committee: Stem Cell Research Oversight and Deliberation in the USA"
Speaker:
Rachel Douglas-Jones, Assistant Professor, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Contact:
Shana Ashar
shana_ashar@hks.harvard.edu
Chair:
Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.
Lunch is provided if you RSVP via our online form by Thursday of the week before the event.
Abstract:
Over the last decade, Embryonic Stem Cell Research Oversight Committees (ESCROs) have become a familiar part of the American research landscape, for scientists and institutions alike. Voluntarily adopted following recommendations from the National Academies in 2005, ESCROs now sit within research communities, amongst other local regulatory structures like IRBs and Animal Care and Use committees. Since their establishment, they have developed their own tacit and explicit norms by which to assess what protocols will fall within their purview, and techniques of deliberation over what research should be permitted. Yet in 2013, bioethicists hotly debated their future, with calls for dissolution: had ESCROs ‘worked themselves out of a job’, as some claimed, or were they still necessary, assuring oversight of the promises of a rapidly expanding area of science? The research I discuss in this paper was conducted in the aftermath of this bioethics exchange over the ‘end’ of ESCROs. I set out to empirically understand these committees, to explore how they had come to operate as a means of managing uncertainty and making order within American stem cell science. How did members of ESCROs actually see their role of their committee? What were their concerns about –or confidences in –the system as it had developed? Drawing on empirical research and eighteen interviews with administrative staff and members of ESCROs, IACUCs and IRBs in three contrasting American University settings, this talk explores accounts of institutional, political, public and ethical responsibilities. I build on comparative material on the governance of stem cell science in the UK to make the argument that ESCROs embody and utilize specific modes of reasoning. These modes of reasoning, which have emerged within ESCROs’ largely self-defined, unfixed scope, entail interactions of biological, ethical and legal expertise, and their documentation forms the basis for an empirical understanding of the meaning of oversight.
Biography:
Rachel Douglas-Jones is an Assistant Professor at the IT University in Copenhagen, where she combines her anthropological and STS training in research on biomedical data and technology ethics within Danish and EU funded research projects. Her ethnographic and theoretical interests centre on the practices and politics of the governance of science and technology, particularly the ways that deliberation, decision making and oversight procedures become established and accepted. Her doctoral work, completed in 2013 at Durham University (UK) provided the first multi-sited study of the expansion of biomedical ethical review processes and standards in the Asian region. She is currently developing the manuscript into a book. In her subsequent postdoctoral stay at Harvard in 2014 on the Biology and Law project, she drew on her work with Asian ethics committees to design the ESCRO study upon which this presentation is based.
