EGN Conference 2013 - ESRC Genomics Network: As one phase ends, another begins…

by Chris Berry, Genomics Forum Press and Communications Officer

#egn13

The final session of the 2013 EGN conference was appropriately dedicated to examining how engagement between the social and life sciences would continue beyond the Genomics Network.

In his introduction, the session chair – Graeme Nicol, Former ESRC Research Committee Member and Impact Champion – indicated how appropriate it had been that the conference had focused on the “return on ESRC’s investment” the Network had achieved during the last decade, demonstrating exactly how substantial this had been. With that investment now nearing its end, the closing session of the conference would allow the Directors of the four Network Centres to not only to look back on their work, but to also to highlight the future plans and trajectories for these.

The Genomics Forum was first to contribute, with former Deputy Director, Dr Steve Sturdy, speaking in place of Forum Director, Professor Steve Yearley, who unfortunately was unable to attend the conference due to illness.

Steve commended the ESRC for, 10 years ago, having the vision to identify the important transformations that developments in the life sciences were beginning to have upon society. The ESRC responded accordingly by funding the three research Centres and the Genomics Forum to investigate and engage with these societal impacts, under the umbrella of the Genomics Network.

Elaborating on the work of the Genomics Forum, Dr Sturdy indicated that the ESRC was visionary in establishing this not to undertake research, but to provide an interface between the issues being researched by the other three Centres and key stakeholder audiences, including scientists, policymakers and the public.

Steve concluded by indicating that even though there would no longer be a role for the Genomics Forum beyond the end of the Genomics Network, an element of “Forum-ness” has been inculcated into the remaining Centres and more widely, and this would act as a fitting legacy to the Forum’s work and impact.

Professor David Castle spoke about the future direction of Innogen. He indicated that the partnership between the University of Edinburgh and the Open University would endure, and this had been cemented by the establishment of a memorandum of understanding. The Centre was undertaking a process of rebranding; reflect its ongoing movement away from its original focus on “genomics” to a more general interest in socioeconomic influences resulting from the life sciences and technical innovation.

David further indicated that the repositioning of Innogen to become the Innogen Institute would be phased, with the new Centre increasing its activity on the run up to the final cessation EGN-related research in March 2014. The work of the new Innogen Institute would build upon that of the old Centre, which had recognised publications in almost all areas of “the Web of Science”, and the Institute’s work would be supported by an ever increasing number of UK and international funders.

Professor Castle also noted that as well as undertaking research, the new Institute would focus upon providing tailor-made training, such as the new MSc in Management of Bio-economy Innovation and Governance.

Setting out the future direction of Cesagen, Professor Ruth Chadwick indicated that the formal collaboration between the Universities of Lancaster and Cardiff would cease in June 2013. However, a number of pre-existing links and collaborations will continue, resulting in tangible outputs such as the journal New Genetics and Society.

Cesagen will continue as a Cardiff-based centre for social science research, but it would transform itself to become the Centre for Ethical and Social Aspects of Genomics and Epigenetics (CESAGENE). Ruth stated that research activity would be located at the Cardiff School of Social Sciences, but would also feature internal collaborations with other schools at Cardiff University. Cesagene’s research would focus on key themes that include: personalised medicine; epigenetics; ageing; and food.

Egenis Director, Professor John Dupré, started by identifying that his Centre had a different background to the others within the Network, resulting in some distinctive features in the work Egenis undertakes. Specifically, Egenis has brought together the fields of sociology, STS, the philosophy of science, and (increasingly) anthropology, which do not necessarily naturally complement each other. Its work has been wide-ranging during the last decade, covering subjects as diverse as polygenic disease, the “philosophy” of stem cells, and “big data”.

John set out that his Centre will also continue beyond the end of the Network, with Egenis being the title that represents the Exeter Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences. The Centre would continue to focus on research into areas such as: genetics and identity; health technology and its impact on society (and in particular, the role of diagnosis); autism, dyslexia and ADHD; and the role of data within research.

Professor Dupré will continue as Director of Egenis. In addition to this role, he will lead a project relating to the ontology of contemporary biology.

With the Centre Directors having set out their visions of the future for their respective institutions, the ESRC Chief Executive – Professor Paul Boyle – concluded the conference. He stated that the ESRC had made a very wise choice when it agreed to fund the Genomics Network a decade ago. The Network exemplifies the historic and future requirement for research into the societal impact of developments in the life sciences, and it will still be a number of years until it is known exactly how successful the ESRC’s investment has been. In many ways, “This is not the end…” Professor Boyle stated. Although the ESRC may not now fund the Network directly, it will remain very supportive of the sort of social science research Network Centres have, and will continue, to undertake.

EGN Conference 2013 - Poetry in Residence

by Samantha Walton - Genomics Forum Poet in Residence

While dedicated bloggers across the Genomics Network were providing detailed accounts of arguments raised and research outlined in panels and plenary sessions at the EGN Conference 2013 , the TTAGGG poetry sequence began to be mapped. In her welcoming address, Catherine Lyall introduced delegates to the sequence and to the presence of a poet at the conference as an ‘experiment’, a term which I thought summarised the project with particular accuracy. In my own description of the sequence in the conference programme, I had urged delegates to get involved in the following (I hoped, persuasive) way:

TTAGGG is an open source poetry sequence generated through contributions from EGN 13 delegates. Contributions may be segments of verse borrowed (or hacked) from existing poems or prose, or they may be individual words or fragments of ‘found’ text snipped from the conference programme or heard in presentations and discussions. You might write your own poetic responses to ideas generated throughout the conference, or to the poem itself as it is built and modified online. An experiment in artificial evolution in the creative commons, the TTAGGG sequence will store complex information, respond to its environment and be a thing of strange beauty, open to modification, enhancement, repetition and mutation.

While the poetry I had been writing ‘in residence’ at the Forum was mostly concerned with epigenetics, I saw the TTAGGG sequence as a way of testing the notion of the poem as a mode of recording personal emotion expression. This was in part an attempt to move away from the kind of anecdotal lyricism that is often the obvious poetic response to ‘difficult’ issues in medicine and science: it seemed there were far more interesting and relevant ways of considering how developments in the life sciences could be discussed in poetry than imagining how they might make a single poetic speaker feel. I’ve been interested in the representation of medicine in literature for some time, and I wanted to produce something quite different from the kind of first-person poetry that frequently comes out of such interchanges – a frustrated and often powerless voice, an ‘I’ trying to understand how developments may affect my understanding of my body, myself. It wasn’t that I found such personal insight insignificant, rather it seemed that to do justice to the unique interface between the life sciences and social sciences achieved throughout the run of the Genomics Network, an approach which incorporated a range of perspectives and modes of address needed to be attempted. By eliciting contributions from delegates, and by trying to depersonalise my own contributions to the sequence by using found text, snippets of conversations and presentations, I hoped to sidestep the responsibility of providing a subjective account of such a diverse programme and try to achieve the kind of plurality, performative objectivity and variation of thought and insight that these complex issues deserved.

           Getting policy makers, social scientists, philosophers of bioethics and life science researchers to write poetry, even in little bits, proved, at first, to be a challenge. There’s something about poetry … for a start, people think they can’t do it (make words sound nice etc.), or they feel embarrassed about the image of Romantic swaggering and detached pondering that the word ‘poetry’ summons up. Also, in the midst of the EGN conference, when so much demanding critical, sociological, ethical, scientific, political and philosophical thought is taking place, I suspect that for some delegates it seemed like too much of a mental shift to start thinking ‘poetically’, as if thinking poetically could lead you astray from the serious topics under consideration. I think these reservations, this division of mental labour, suggests that poetry is often perceived to something other than critical public discourse. I haven’t conducted my research yet, but I’d like to postulate that a survey of public attitudes would return the conclusions that the best poetry consists of moving responses to grand themes like love and loss, making it something readers withdraw to help clarify or find voiced their own private troubles and joys. Poetry is often treated like this – an imaginative and aesthetic escape from public life and social realities, providing an affective insight into a kind of subjective territory somewhere between lifeworld and the public sphere. Like much of the ‘health’ themed poetry I read through the medical humanities, the poetic response to genomics, confirming to this idea of poetry, might just have to stop at bittersweet and aggrieved responses to difficult questions and controversial innovations: “Yes, science may say ‘I’ am my genes, but I know better, I can appreciate beauty and feel love, you can’t quantify that.”

Although I don’t doubt that science (even qualitative analysis) can’t process many of the concerns that are central to various poetic traditions (beauty and love included) I can’t help but feel that in poetry’s wider readership, the idea that poetry provides a unique medium not only for responding to, subverting, translating or resisting important and complex new ideas, but actually working through those ideas, testing them, and even contributing to their development, seems to have been, if not forgotten, then perhaps sidelined. This perception seems to run counter to the many ways that poets have written of and using specialised discourses of political thought and scientific enquiry: an incredibly general account might allude to Dante’s interrogations of political practice and faith, Elizabethan discussions of the body politic, Metaphysical poets’ yoking of love and religion to scientific and geographic discoveries, the Romantics’ testing of associationism and the profound engagements with science – from theories of relativity to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Mendelian genetics to Habermasian theory – found in Modernist and contemporary late-Modernist verse. As such, the premise of the TTAGGG Sequence was not just to provide a counter account of the day’s discussions and events – although one delegate did tell me that following the development of the sequence on Twitter provided something of a disruptive echo to the more formal discussions taking place in sessions. Instead, I hoped the fragments, commentaries and contributions might contain questions, provocations and alternative accounts which could feed into a serious discussion of the main issues of the conference. A contemporary poet I admire, Sean Bonney, has spoken of the possibilities of poetry in this way: “there’s certain poems that give me an information, an account of a social reality, that other types of writing don’t. It’s something to do with the speed of connections through the work, the intensity of the communication: conjunctions and intensities that put information across in a way that I don’t find anywhere else.”

I don’t know if the TTAGGG Sequence achieved this, but part of its ‘experimental’ nature was the acceptance that failure might lead to a better understanding of how to frame the question, or what the problem might be. Of the definite successes of the project, I count highly the enthusiastic and intrigued responses I got from many conference delegates. It was refreshing for me to explain how my project tried to participate in the debates of the conference, and to find that though I was coming from a different epistemological position, there was some common ground, and much openness for engagement. The actual poetic contributions I got were delightfully various. Some followed tradition verse structures (the clipped form of the Haiku appealed to many) while others concentrated on the rhetoric of social science and policy communication – the repetitions, freewheeling metaphors, strangeness and contradictions of the language employed in this supposedly objective discipline. In my own contributions, I was surprised by how quickly I fell into an imperative register and how the demands of writing on the spot led me to use the present tense, often utterly eschewing pronouns and prepositions. While anonymity was guaranteed for delegates who wrote their contributions on cards and posted them in the ‘TTAGGG Sequencer’ (my gratitude to Steph Wright for helping me build this complex machine!), additions from private Twitter accounts constituted more of a public statement, and I’m grateful to those who spoke out in this way. I don’t think anyone used my password and took up the offer to sign in to the TTAGGG Twitter account and tweet impersonally from there, which gives an interesting insight into possible concerns about invasions of privacy and the dangers of open access in a field where large data sets and their possible uses is a major point of ethical and legal discussion.

The TTAGGG Sequence will remain on Twitter and can be found at #egn13poetry. However, I am currently working on a number of different ways to manipulate the sequence. In a nod to a purely scientific approach, I am ordering it in simple chronological order (fig. A). In honour of traditional poetic formal constraints, I’m using a programme that organises individual lines into rhyming couplets (and only removing auto-rhymed lines) (fig. B). Finally, I am asserting the troublesome aesthetic and subjective authority of the poet by organising the text into what seems (to me at least) a coherent poem (fig.C). I hope to perform some of it at Syndicate, a new media poetry series I co-host held at Inspace in Edinburgh, on 21^st May.

What the opportunity to act as Poet in Residence at the EGN Conference 2013 and the Genomics Forum through April gave me was the invaluable space to write and also to reflect on the possible modes of communication between poetry, science and social study. I’ve always been interested in the critical potential of poetry, so the insights I have gained ways of approaching and understanding public ethics, cultural differences and social impact within the social sciences have encouraged me to reflect on my own practice as a poet and researcher. I am incredibly grateful for the welcoming and generous response I received at the Forum. I hope the exciting interactions between art and life science studies fostered here will continue in many forms in the future.

Cuts from the TTAGGG Sequence

Fig A.  Chronological

opening provocation: promise/ peril         

what is ... what ... um it's ... a hard question         the people legacy

borrowed from the network

globalisation of the subjects we address

challenges around life s/ on the brink/ of major scale

these bugs/ can eat their own waste!

ignore these/ listen to them/ pull out the science, hold it up/ an heroic vision in messy places

messy like democracy/ sounds like science, golden age/ speaking truth to power

dossier of compromise/ science disappears/ elite compromise vs. idealised advice/ pure & removed: the science dictates

Fig. B.  Rhyming Sequence

Transcription is not fit matter for poesy

TTAGGG poetry sequence is under citizens enquiry

Replication is serious flattery

The enlightenment is not the enemy

Become knowledge, circulate freely

From cutting paper, to CAD molecule, a filmmaker's journey

The deficit model is bankrupt, but has so much currency

If someone mutated my DNA would this then lead my soul astray

Climate change fury, decimation of mankind, fascinating, play

Please capture my core, decorate your DNA for your children

My sweetheart took his burnt toast & departed with his cellular automaton. 

Infinitesimal paper & scissors that should play with hierarchies

Public & private together in this space, between plate & lip

millions of wells reading sequences

Of shrug biologists who say PUBLIC but face but a sacral population's

extended phenotypic structure fluffed to rubric lattices

Fig. C. Poet as Structuring Process

We start with an opening provocation,

under the sign of Watt & ether

shouting out to find a common ground

There weren't too many rules, only

you have to lock people together

for days to get them to understand one another

     's vocabulary

Converting jargon into something

people can understand, that's the knack

Feedback loops between consumers & providers are fraught

with the sheer density & complexity

           of poetry refusing to cooperate

ignore these, listen to them

pull out the science, hold it up: an heroic vision in messy places

 (messy like democracy)

this is sounding like science speaking truth to power

public understanding is itself a metaphor

I liked the people

but I have just one question    a critical remark

 really

What … what would NA12878 do?

what is ... what ... um it's ... a hard question        

it’s a hard thing, being a critical friend: waxing or waning,

meeting for breakfast etc., having a life

talking through issues

etcetera.

Imagining the genome

retro futures under review

the myth of science lives on

a new golden age a newly acceptable Enlightenment continuing

between Adam Smith's tomb at Canongate Kirk

& the cone on David Hume's head

Fluid networks permeate the life science web

philosophers of the future rebound

reflecting on the sound of glitchy data

For philosophies read textual

error: ask a stem cell what it is, res public collaboration shaving words off acronyms

           the TTAGGG Cloud: impossibly linear Wordle!

Perfect distribution of emphasis cut with rigour & balance!

nothing in life expresses ©  like an MOU/kou/□/xxx

we don't yet have a language that doesn't begin

with an assumption of separateness

EGN Conference 2013 -- Opening provocation

by Emma Frow - Genomics Forum Associate Director and Lecturer in Science & Technology Studies, University of Edinburgh

#egn13

It’s a beautiful spring morning in Westminster, and the cherry blossoms are in full bloom. A fitting occasion to gather and celebrate a decade’s worth of achievements of the ESRC Genomics Network.

The conference opened with a tantalizing film clip (by filmmakers-in-residence Cameron Duguid & Lindsay Goodall) in which several EGN researchers grappled with the question ‘What is genomics?’…more on that later! Genomics Forum Deputy Director CatherineLyall then welcomed everyone to the meeting, and noted that poet-in-residence Samantha Walton will also be capturing this event in verse.

Adrian Alsop (Director of Research at the ESRC) provided some opening reflections regarding a decade of significant change for the ESRC, noting several significant shifts that have taken place in research policy and strategy over the lifetime of the EGN. Notably, ‘impact’ has become an increasingly dominant narrative for UK research, and the ESRC has been influenced by engagement with EGN researchers to define and support a definition of impact that embraces a wide variety of activities. A second big change that the ESRC is working with is the rise of an industrial strategy for science, one that strives to scale up industrial biotechnology with the promise of promoting health, wealth and an increasingly sustainable bioeconomy. Growing investments in ‘big data’ and the increasingly global character of social science research are two further changes influencing the context in which the ESRC operates. How to analyse and engage with these changes is an ongoing challenge and opportunity for social science research.

Adrian noted that EGN research has kept pace with several of these broader changes, and suggested that the interface between the life sciences and social sciences will continue to be a major theme for the first half of the 21^st century. Maintaining quality, impact, and independence in social science research will be critical.

We then moved on to a provocation by Roger Pielke entitled ‘Five Lessons of Science Advice.’ Roger highlighted the ongoing relevance of this topic by flagging up George Monbiot’s column in The Guardian yesterday, which focuses on the role of science advice around the current debates on bee health and pesticide use in Europe. 

Roger drew on over a decade of research, and specifically a series of interviews he has done with 7 US Presidential science advisers, to offer some key lessons about science advice, with some great cartoons to accompany these thoughts: 

Lesson #1: Science advisers are not superheroes. There is still a widespread expectation that ‘science speaks truth to power,’ and scientific evidence should be able to tell us what to do in tricky political situations. The reality is a bit more complicated, and the path between scientific knowledge, advice and decision-making in democracies is messier.

Lesson #2: ‘Science advice’ is a misnomer. Roger argued that we should be thinking instead in terms of ‘political advice.’

Lesson #3: Political advice from a science adviser can take multiple forms. Using a lively example about finding somewhere to eat dinner in London, Roger outlined 4 idealized categories of advice about science, which are expanded on at length in his book The Honest Broker. 

Lesson #4: Institutions matter. Institutional structures can end up having significant effects on decision-making practices, and we need to be sensitive to these broader factors. Roger gave us the example of the US President’s science adviser, who is formally positioned outside the President’s ‘inner circle’ of advisers (in part because science advisers can be called to testify in front of Congress, a level of exposure that precludes participation in highest-level decision-making). 

Lesson #5: “Politics is more difficult than physics” (a well-known quote from Einstein). Political thinking is very different from scientific thinking, and in practice science advisers need considerable experience in politics to do their jobs.

Roger concluded by saying that in the US and Europe, science enjoys enormous respect and authority, and that the ‘mythology of heroic science advice’ lives on – with a growing role for science advice currently being highlighted by institutions including the United Nations and the UK House of Lords.

The stories have been told. Ann Lingard

by Ann Lingard - Novelist, journalist, former ESRC Genomics Forum Visiting Research Fellow

Two hundred people had booked tickets for our "Tell them our stories" event in the Anatomy Lecture Theatre! Why so many? Someone commented that people have always been fascinated by the exhibits in the Surgeons' Hall Museum; it has long been one of the City's 'must-see' places, and indeed, the Tansey & Mekie 'History of the Museum' (1978) refers to a time when 'Visitors of the lower classes, mechanics, sailors and soldiers have uniformly been quiet, careful and most orderly…visitors of the lower classes seem to take more interest in the specimens than those of the higher, many of whom, especially ladies, merely walk through the rooms without looking at the objects particularly.'

The programme included me talking about my background research on some of the exhibits, and reading extracts from my partly fictionalised stories of the 'donors'; poet and novelist Diana Hendry talking about her work as Writer in Residence at Dumfries Infirmary, and how she had come to write a poem about the Museum's 'Man with Three Legs'; and Andrew Connell, the Museum's Collections Manager, talking – in front of a background of constantly changing images from the Collection – about new uses for the Collection.

So the three of us represented a broad range of interests in the exhibits, perhaps appealing to a mix of medical historians, poets, writers, ethicists and scientists.

IB3 at The Revolution will be Bio-Based

Blog by Paul Dalgarno, IB3 at Heriot Watt University

It was a great privilege for myself and my colleagues from the Institute of Biological Chemistry, Biophysics and Bioengineering (IB3) and the Centre for Marine Biodiversity and Biotechnology (CMBB) to take part in the ESRC “The Revolution will be Bio-Based” public exhibition on Saturday 10 November. As a research led institute our work at Heriot-Watt University is based on asking, and occasionally answering, fundamental questions on biology and marine conversation. However, this event allowed us, and the visitors, to explore some of the wider reaching aspects of our work and the impact it has had, or may have, on economics, culture and society in general.

The IB3 team are at the forefront of inter-disciplinary research in cell biology, using genes from fluorescent marine organisms, such as the luminescence sea anemone on display, to probe proteins inside living cells. By combining this state-of-the-art cell biology with input from physicists, mathematician and engineers we push the limits of cellular imaging and microscopy. Our exhibition demonstrated the huge impact that fluorescence proteins and gene technology has had on modern biological science, an impact that cannot be underestimated. It led to the 2008 Chemistry Nobel price and a global industry which is now at the heart of modern biological science. It was a pleasure to discuss with the public the underlying science, importance and the role fluorescence has had on our research and biological science in general.

Our exhibition, generously supported by the Medical Research Council (MRC), and Leica Microsytems, who provided a state-of-the art fluorescence microscope for public demonstration, was split into three sections. First researchers from CMBB had the living example of a naturally fluorescent sea anemone sourced from local Fife waters. Along with a touch tank of local marine life (starfish, crabs and shrimps) this display highlighted the importance of cold water marine conservation. The fluorescent microscope provided by Leica allowed members of the public to look at fluorescently labeled cancer cells, which proved to be very popular. Finally custom-made exhibits explained bio-fluorescence and the physics behind 3-dimensional imaging techniques being developed in IB3. Together these displays took members of the public from marine biology to optical physics in three short steps.

IB3 and CMBB regularly take part in public outreach activities, which are essential so that scientists can get out of the lab and explain what they do to the public, who in many cases fund this type of research. However this event offered much more than the typical demonstrations: by encouraging us to discuss with the public the role our research has had, or may have, economically and culturally. It was a true pleasure to engage with interested members from the public, from all backgrounds and ages. All the volunteers greatly enjoyed the experience but more importantly the public seemed to enjoy the day.

The event was a great success and we would like to thank the organizers, the visitors, the other exhibitors and the speakers for making this so and we look forward to seeing you at our next outreach event.

In-Vitro meat - Gauging the yuck factor...

by Cameron Duguid - Documentary Filmmaker in Residence

Our research trip was fascinating, with a spectrum of interesting topics discussed, it seems a shame to inadequately summarise the whole thing.

After talking with Neil Stephens and watching his talk on in-vitro meat, for me, the argument for its development has only become more complex, with many grey areas adding to this. For example- how do you gauge the yuck factor? With food being such a subjective area, it will definitely be influenced by being figuratively and literally a matter of taste. Personally there are many things that contribute to the ickyness, however, I’m only going to focus on one, partly because it’s the one thing/phrase that has stuck in my mind, but also, it’s for just that reason that it’s important. After 3 days of information overload, with such complex interconnected topics, phrases and acronyms can easily be glossed over, even if they are of great importance.

Fetal Bovine Serum

It has been proposed that this month, at a date that seems to be pretty closely guarded, the first in-vitro burger will be eaten. The cells to be formed into a burger, as with most lab-grown animal cells, are currently grown on Fetal Bovine Serum. Possibilities in using a type of algae as a growing medium have been proposed. At present cells are often sensitive to differences between batches of FBS, a transition can be made mixing some of the present serum with the new serum as an intermediary stage. However, if this small transition is sensitive, then the extension to growing on algae seems a bit of a leap.

To obtain ‘FBS’ there is a need for extensively farmed cows, as only a proportion will happen to be pregnant at the time of slaughter. So the current techniques in cell culture don’t seem too harmonious with both the animal welfare/meat alternative side, and environmental concerns with land use, water and gas emissions.

Blogger’s Block

by Lindsay Goodall - Documentary Filmmaker in Residence

I have been a bit blocked recently when I’ve tried to write my blog. I think it’s because I’ve been so busy over the past few weeks. I’ve been to a convergence workshop, a STIS seminar on Syngenta, the Innogen coffee morning, a Changing World lecture, an anthropology seminar on sperm banks in China, I’ve been reading a lot and trying to participate as much as possible. Now the challenge is to wade through all this new-found information to find some clarity and focus. Yet the more I discover the more I need to know, and the research phase of my residency could easily continue exponentially. I sympathise with the scientists working on the ENCODE Project. How do you know when to stop searching for new information and start to process the raw data?

While carrying out my research, I’ve become as fascinated by academia as I am with all things genomics, and surprisingly I’ve realised there are so many similarities between university life and the film and TV industry. For example, there is the constant pressure to seek funding, produce new work and keep on top of new developments and technology; the uncertainty about where your next project or commission will come from or where it will be based; there is a need to network and make contacts both locally and internationally; and there are lots of opportunities to travel and work with new partners and collaborators.