Debating the risks and ethics of emerging technosciences

Abstract

Controversies on emerging technosciences, such as agri-biotechnology and medical biotechnology, have been a formative aspect of the public response to technoscientific innovations for the last decades. Within these controversies, the problematization of technoscience has not always been framed in the same way. Debates on agri-biotechnological applications focus mostly on issues of risk and safety and on questions about evidence and uncertainty. In contrast, debates on medical biotechnologies center primarily on differences of opinion about the ascribed ontological status of the related objects and the ethical acceptability of the technoscientific interventions. The first controversy can be described as mainly risk-focused, the second controversy as mainly ethically framed. These two different modes of framing agri-biotechnology and medical biotechnology are compared and discussed, addressing public and regulatory discourse, the related polity systems and modes of governance. Empirical examples stem from Germany and Great Britain.

Keywords:

• agri-biotechnology
• medical biotechnology
• risk
• ethics
• governance
• discourse
• frame analysis

Acknowledgements

The scope of this article has been inspired by discussions with Alexander Bogner and Helge Torgersen, both at the Institute of Technology Assessment. The final article benefited from very helpful criticism by Jacquelyne Luce (Zeppelin University) and one anonymous reviewer.

Notes

1. These data were collected within the project “Nichtwissenskulturen”. It was conducted 2004–2007 at the University of Augsburg together with Stefan Böschen, Jens Soentgen, Peter Wehling, Ina Rust and Luitgard Marschall

2. This analysis is currently being carried out by myself at the Institute of Technology Assessment at the Austrian Academy of Sciences

3. For a discussion of a “Foucauldian analytics of government” and of governmental ethics regimes, see Braun et al. (2008 and submitted manuscript)

4. The terms “technoscience” and “emerging technologies” are here used synonymously, following the assumption that scientific research, technological innovation and technological application are closely related practically and functionally within the emergence of new biotechnologies. For a discussion of the characteristics of technoscience, see Nordmann (2006), for a discussion of the societal developments related to technoscience, see Pestre (2008)

5. The US Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (1972–1995) was the first technology assessment institute to be established and the only one to be closed down again. The Office of Technology Assessment at the German Parliament and the UK Parliamentary Office of Technology Assessment (POST) were established in 1989/1990. STOA, Science and Technology Options Assessment for the European Parliament was established in 1987, the EPTA Network for European Parliamentary Technology Assessment was founded in 1990. The Austrian Institute of Technology Assessment (ITA) was set up in 1994 and the German Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS) in 1995

6. A quantitative investigation is presented, for instance, in Critchley and Turney (2004)

7. Lassen et al. (2002) depict the export of genetically modified soybeans by the US company Monsanto to Europe in 1996 as a key stimulus for public debate. Einsiedel et al. (2002) depict the cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1997 as a key stimulus for public debate and identify two general frames: a frame of doom and a frame of progress (ibid., p. 330). Under the more specific frame “consequences” (one among others, such as “threats to identity”, “crossing boundaries”, “runaway science” and “progress”), the authors note: “The perception of risks, on the other hand [i.e. as against the perception of benefits], is more homogenous, with moral risks underlined in every single country” (ibid., p. 334). Hence, whereas the general frames do not depict risk or ethics, the more specific description supports the assumption that animal biotechnology is related to moral rather than ecological or health risks

8. For this differentiation, cf. Dahinden (2006, pp. 203–206). He discerns deductive–quantitative, inductive–qualitative and inductive–quantitative approaches to frame analysis

9. Relative prominence is reported as against prominence in other countries, not relative prominence as compared with other frames in the same country. The medical frame is most prominent in all countries, except Denmark, where “animal and agriculture” prevails and Germany, where “regulatory” prevails

10. The same frame analysis and resulting frames are referred to in Durant et al. (1998)

11. Wynne (2001, p. 447): “The institutionalized divorce of risk concerns from ethical concerns, and the consequent construction of each of these distinct categories, fails to see that public meanings and responses do not even fit these categories, let alone agree or disagree with them”. Cf. also Gaskell and Allum (2001)

12. Sixteen debates, including 12 major ones

13. Twenty-one debates, of which only two were major debates (8 June 2000 House of Commons Hansard and 5 May 2004, House of Commons Hansard)

14. Web of Science^® Database, including the Science Citation Index Expanded, the Social Sciences Citation Index, the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, the Index Chemicus and the Current Chemical Reactions from 2000 onwards. Available from: http://apps.isiknowledge.com/ [Accessed 7 July 2008]

15. The search terms “stem cell*” and “genetically” AND “food” were finally chosen because they did generate some results. The combination of “genetically” AND “food” was chosen to represent agri-biotechnology because it resulted in a maximum of hits (for “agri-biotech” in combination with ethic*/moral*/religio* or risk*/safe* only five records (1: 4) are found; for combinations with “GMO*” 36 and 277 records are reported)

16. Search in Web of Science^® for the years 2000 until the present for [“stem cell” AND risk*] OR [“stem cell” AND safe*]; [“stem cell” AND ethic*] OR [“stem cell” AND moral*] OR [“stem cell” AND religio*]; [“genetically” AND “food” AND risk*] OR [“genetically” AND “food” AND safe*], [“genetically” AND “food” AND ethic*] OR [“genetically” AND “food” AND moral*] OR [“genetically” AND “food” AND religio*]. Performed 7 July 2008

17. For an account of the British situation concerning the governance of the two biotechnological fields, see also Salter and Jones (2006)

18. There is a fluctuating composition of members. The composition was broadened in 2002 to include additional expertise in farming, consumer protection and nature conservation. This change was reversed only two years later

19. “Expertise of non-mainstream scientific research institutions, such as Öko-Institut, gained a standing in GMO risk judgement” in 2002 (Boschert and Gill 2005)

20. Referring to an agricultural transition towards sustainability

21. “ACRE is an independent Advisory Committee composed of leading scientists. Our main function is to give statutory advice to Ministers in the UK and devolved administrations on the risks to human health and the environment from the release and marketing of genetically modified organisms (GMOs)”. Available from: http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/acre/ [Accessed 7 July 2008]

22. “The Food Standards Agency is an independent Government department set up by an Act of Parliament in 2000 to protect the public's health and consumer interests in relation to food. Everything we do reflects our vision of safe food and healthy eating for all”. Available from: www.food.gov.uk/aboutus/ [Accessed 7 July 2008]

23. “The Government set out its policy on the commercial cultivation of GM crops in a statement to Parliament in March 2004. The Government has concluded that there is no scientific case for a blanket ban on the cultivation of GM crops in the UK, but that proposed uses need to be assessed for safety on a case-by-case basis”. Available from: http://www.defra.gov.uk/FARM/crops/gm/index.htm [Accessed 7 July 2008]

24. “We are the Government strategic advisory body on biotechnology issues affecting agriculture and the environment … Our remit is to provide the UK Government and Devolved Administrations with independent, strategic advice on developments in biotechnology and their implications for agriculture and the environment. It looks at the broad picture taking ethical and social issues into account as well as the science”. Available from: http://www.aebc.gov.uk/ [Accessed 7 July 2008]

25. Comparable with the mainstreaming of the membership of the ZKBS only two years after its enlargement, the closure of the AEBC five years after its establishment was commented on by its members with a reference to the membership issue. In a letter of January 2005, reacting to the review and the future of AEBC, the then AEBC chair, Malcolm Grant, stated: “No AEBC member has disagreed with the main recommendation of the review report that the Commission should be wound up after completing its current work program … However, there is also eagerness to ensure that the legacy of the AEBC – its remit, ways of working and breadth of membership – is sustained in some way after its end”. AEBC members also complained that the review “seemed to start from the premise that advisory bodies must meet narrow targets and restrict themselves to specific issues, and overlooked the AEBC's role as a forum for anyone who wishes to engage in debate about agricultural biotechnology”. Available from: www.aebc.gov.uk/aebc/reports/members_response_aebc_review.doc [Accessed 7 July 2008]

26. Cf. also Grove-White's (2001, p. 471) comment on the AEBC: “There's a deep ethical issue here – the need for responsibility to be taken for key dimensions of the new technologies – of which an educated public is increasingly aware. But it's an ethical issue buried, currently, within the science”

27. The HFEA is not the only regulatory body involved in the regulation of medical biotechnology. Depending on the context of application, further institutions become relevant, e.g. the Human Tissue Authority, the Human Genetics Advisory Commission, the Gene Therapy Advisory Committee or – in the case of stem cell banking – the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency and the non-statutory Steering Committee of the UK Stem Cell Bank (including “expertise in obstetrics, surgery, clinical embryology, bioethics, theology, law, stem cell research, midwifery, cell banking and sociology, and two lay members and representatives from the regulatory and funding agencies”, cf. http://www.stemcellforum.org/registries_&_banks/uk_stem_cell_bank.cfm [accessed 7 July 2008]).The HFEA is dealt with here in more detail because it plays an important role in the UK's struggles to formulate and reformulate a national policy and regulatory system for medical biotechnoscience. It can also be treated exemplarily for other relevant bodies concerning its mixed scientific and ethical expertise. In the 2001 debate on the widening of the scope of the HFE Act 1990, one Member of Parliament summarized: “Three separate authorities, all of which have had both medical and theological input, have considered the question of whether stem cell research should be added to that limited list. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, the Human Genetics Advisory Commission and the chief medical officer's inquiry – the Donaldson report – have all come to the conclusion that there is no moral or ethical barrier to extending the list of purposes to cover stem cell research, but that the existing ban on reproductive cloning should continue. Leading ethical bodies, such as the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and the British Medical Association, have also considered the matter and agree”. (Baroness Sharp of Guildford, HL Deb, 22 Jan. 2001, vol. 621, col. 112)

28. Available from: http://www.hfea.gov.uk/en/272.html [Accessed 7 July 2008]

29. “The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) was established by an Act of Parliament in response to deep public concern about the implications which new techniques for assisted reproduction might have for the perception and valuing of human life and family relationships”. Available from: http://www.hfea.gov.uk/ [Accessed 7 July 2008]

30. In 2001, the law was extended to include therapeutic treatments and to allow for relating research applications. Later on the same year, the Human Reproductive Cloning Bill became law, criminalizing any attempt at reproductive cloning (cf. O'Neill 2003). Recently, the engineering of human–animal hybrid cells (“chimera embryos” or “human admixed embryos”), the need for a father, embryo screening and information about parenthood given to children have been debated and will be covered by a new Act

31. “The HFEA's Ethics and Law Advisory Group meets four times a year to review social, ethical and legal issues arising from, or affecting, activities in which the HFEA has an interest”. It “is a subcommittee of the Authority and comprises Authority members and co-opted members. Chaired by Bishop Reverend Richard Harries, the ELC meets four to five times a year and considers the ethical, social and legal aspects of the Authority's work” . Available from: http://www.hfea.gov.uk [Accessed 7 July 2008]

32. Clinical ethics committees concerned with medical practice represent another kind of medical ethics committees. Since 1997, these have been established in various clinics in Germany; Kettner and May (2002) speak of 76 such clinical ethics committees, of which only six have been established in non-confessional clinics. Slowther et al. (2001) mention 20 formal clinical ethics committees in the UK in 2001, which had mostly been in existence for less than five years and “are still defining their role”. Hence, they have an advisory rather than a regulatory character, although the boundaries between advice and regulation are evidently blurred

33. Participatory exercises concerning agri-biotechnology are critically compared in Levidow (2007). The actual role of such exercises within technoscience governance and possible differences between the two biotechnological fields still need further elaboration

34. For example, in the UK parliamentary debate on medical biotechnology regulation, the so-called Donaldson Report (named after the chief medical officer chairing an expert group on cloning) played an important role, as did the report of select committees of both Houses

35. The German bio-safety research program goes back as far as 1997–2001. Further calls for research projects were issued for the periods 2001–2004, 2004–2007, 2007–2010. The contribution of such ecological Begleitforschung to enacting the precautionary principle is explicitly claimed by the funding ministry

36. Similarly, the Biotechnology Risk Assessment Research Grants Program was launched in the USA

37. The report of this first commission on biotechnology covers various biotechnological fields (including agri-biotechnology, medical biotechnology and human genetics) without a clear RED/GREEN divide. Instead of clearly distinguishable risk and ethics frames, multiple framings prevail (like ecological, health, economic or safety implications). Solely the discussion of the implications of genetic intervention in the human germline includes a separate section on ethical consequences (cf. http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/10/067/1006775.pdf [Accessed 4 December 2008])

38. “The Nuffield Council on Bioethics examines ethical issues raised by new developments in biology and medicine … The Council has achieved an international reputation for addressing public concerns, and providing independent advice to assist policy makers and stimulate debate in bioethics”. Available from: http://www.nuffieldbioethics.org/ [Accessed 7 July 2008]

39. “We are the UK Government's advisory body on new developments in human genetics and how they impact on individual lives. We give the Government advice on human genetics with a particular focus on the social, ethical and legal issues. One of our key roles is to promote debate and to listen to what the public and our stakeholders have to say. We are committed to openness and transparency”. Available from: http://www.hgc.gov.uk/ [Accessed 7 July 2008]

40. Themes include the persistence of hunger in the world and our moral obligation to press for changes to hasten its elimination; the environmental damage caused by agricultural practices and our obligation to preserve biodiversity in local and global contexts; questions concerning the acceptability of the major impact of new (bio)technologies on food, animals, the environment and society at large; questions of consumer trust and industrial trustworthiness in the areas of food safety and food ethics; the importance of respecting animal welfare and animal health in (intensive) husbandry systems; and questions concerning human health and healthy food

41. Bhardwaj et al. (2003) investigated the “concerns behind the development of the Ethics in Food and Agriculture Program at FAO. Interviews with staff members ‘revealed that although ethics as a word was not widely and openly discussed at FAO until the end of the 1990s …, the members had deep ethical motivation for their work’ and ‘[m]ost of the interviewed staff saw ethics as the basis of the constitutional mandate’ of the FAO” (ibid, p. 565)

42. Measures of regulating medical biotechnology include moratoria that apply to research in the laboratory (such as the moratorium on human reproductive cloning in Israel in 1999), prohibition of certain kinds of research (such as the HFE Act 1990 in the UK, authorizing research on embryos only in the context of infertility treatment and pregnancy), general prohibition (such as the German Embryo Protection Act 1990, outlawing most types of embryo research or the Human Reproductive Cloning Act 2001 in the UK), licensing arrangements and authorities (HFE Act 1990, HFE Act 2008) or funding restrictions such as that formulated in the US stem cell law, which bans all federally-funded stem cell research (cf. Gottweis, 2004, p. 248ff.)

43. Cf. also the introductory quotation in this paper

44. For a detailed historical account of different actors mentioned in the media, see Nisbet and Lewenstein (2002)

45. For a detailed historical account of different actors mentioned in the media, see Nisbet and Lewenstein (2002)

46. The broadening of legitimate contributors to ethics-focused deliberation is exemplarily legitimized in a parliamentary statement on the absence of a need for a national bioethics commission in the UK by Baroness Kennedy:

[T]o start setting up a bioethics commission and to have a contention as to who should be on it and who might be represented on it will inevitably lead to a politicisation that I think we should avoid. I return to my submission to this House, which is that we are all ethicists. (Baroness Kennedy, HL Deb, 28 Jan. 2008, vol. 698, col. 490)

47. “This obligation to base statements on an impartial consideration of the evidence applies as much to campaigning organizations as it does to any other public or professional body. We are skeptical about claims from individuals or organizations who found their arguments on political convictions rather than scientific evidence” (Nuffield Council on Bioethics 2003)

48. In her analysis of bioethics committees as boundary organizations Kelly (2003, p. 344) notes that “the boundary work when science controversy is framed as moral dispute, rather than merely technical or political, involves somewhat different challenges to both science and politics; where disputes critical to science lie outside its domain of authority, scientists may seek to blur rather than demarcate boundaries among political, ethical, and scientific spaces … Furthermore, participants in public ethics bodies operate as technical, advisory, and individual/private moral actors”

49. Cf. Nuffield Council on Bioethics (1999, p. 3): “No ethical concerns can be all things to all people and we accept that some religious and other philosophical applications will have a different starting point to our own. This report is grounded in liberal, scientific values and takes a broadly utilitarian approach to ethics, a starting point which is shared by most people in the UK”. Scientific inquiry – at least in theory – builds upon a theoretical possibility of consensus, whilst ethical debate is based upon the acknowledgment of irreconcilable ethical standpoints. Cf. Dodds and Thomson (2006, p. 333): “Although ‘overlapping consensus’ may be found on many topics of public policy, in the areas of bioethical policy in which NBOs [i.e. national bioethics organizations] are often called upon to deliberate, there is frequently little ground for such consensus to be found”

50. Reported statement by the The Hinxton consortium, an international group of scientists formed in 2004 to “explore the ethical and policy challenges of transnational scientific collaboration raised by variations in national regulations governing embryo research and stem cell science”, cf. http://www.hinxtongroup.org/au.html [Accessed 7 Dec 2008]

51. This holds true especially for the UK context. It is mirrored by the development of the HFE Act 1990 and the related parliamentary debates during the past decades

52. Another explanation for the ongoing controversy could be that technoscience does not cease producing new contested artifacts and practices