Date:
Location:
"Governance of Security Concerns in Science"
Speaker:
Sam Weiss Evans, Senior Research Fellow, Program for Science, Technology, and Society, Harvard Kennedy School; Research Associate, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Contact:
Laura Flynn
lauraflynn@hks.harvard.edu
Co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.
Chair:
Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies; Professor of Environmental Science and Public Policy, Committee on Degrees in Environmental Science and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School.
Abstract:
There is an impending clash within the science and security governance landscape in the United States. On the one hand, a 40-year-old policy, NSDD-189, draws a bright line around “fundamental research” and exempts it from nearly all security oversight. On the other hand, a set of experiments in governance over the last decade or so, largely in biology, have actively worked to attend to potential security concerns in fundamental research. Each of these approaches makes different assumptions about the structure of science, the concept of security, and who has responsibility for governing security concerns in science. In this talk, I show how different assumptions about the structure of science (e.g. whether it produces objective facts about the world, or is inherently a social process) are tied to particular ways of governing the security concerns that may arise from it. I argue that NSDD-189, while still useful when applied to the limited realm of export controls, is hardly sufficient to address the much broader range of security concerns that confront science today. Instead, we need to learn from, and further support, experiments in security governance that attend to science as a social process.
