When social scientists and ethicists are involved in the scientific process, a broader set of perspectives is unlocked to understand the potential implications of emerging research. This can help avoid missteps or mistakes that can erode trust between scientists and the communities they aim to serve.
While these interdisciplinary collaborations are increasingly common, there has been little data collected on the experiences and impacts of these collaborations on scientists. With the support of nearly $400,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF), UC Santa Cruz Professor of Sociology Jenny Reardon will lead an effort to collect data on scientists’ experiences of these efforts, and contribute to the development of best practice recommendations for these interdisciplinary endeavors.
The two-year project will focus on the emergent and impactful fields of genomics, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence (AI). The effort will be co-led by Sara Goering at the University of Washington, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee at Colombia, and Aaron Panofsky at UCLA, with additional support from researchers at Stanford and Harvard.
“This grant allows us to focus on the experiences of scientists,” Reardon said. “What are they thinking about their experience with this type of collaboration and emerging best practices, and how are scientists and engineers developing their own notions of ethics? In a time with enormously important new forms of tech coming onboard, it’s critical that we figure out how to work well together.”
Reardon is the founding director of the Science and Justice Research Center at UC Santa Cruz, which takes an integrated and collaborative approach to scientific research and the pursuit of justice.
She has been interested in the intersection of science and ethics since she was a budding genomics scientist and saw firsthand how projects posed as seemingly neutral could create harm for communities. Her personal experience echoes a history of negative and even devastating consequences when ethics are not considered upfront in the scientific process.
Over the years, as more and more research evidence has emerged to that effect, Reardon has seen policymakers and funding agencies increasingly encourage—and sometimes even require—social scientists to be embedded into science and engineering research. To better understand how this has played out for scientists, the researchers will interview scientists and research administrators to gather data around questions of what has worked well, what challenges arise, how scientists develop their notions of ethics, and how collaborations differ across academia and industry.
These findings will contribute to ongoing efforts to generate recommendations for researchers, funders, and policymakers on how to forge interactions between research scientists, ethicists, and social scientists that foster more ethical research and advance the public good.
“Collaborating together is very hard work and creates tensions, so the question is how best to navigate those,” Reardon said.
The fields of genomics, neuroscience, and AI were chosen as they present complex, high stakes projects that are expected to lead to critical emerging technologies. These three fields have both a history and stated future goals of working to integrate ethics, and can offer a view into how both public funding and the private sector can shape ethical engagement.
The research team will compare results from this project with data from prior research on social scientists and ethicists’ perceptions of and experiences with this process in the same three research areas. Together, these data will provide a more holistic view of how embedding ethics in science is perceived and enacted.
Even as scientific funding at the federal level is now trending toward pulling back on ethical requirements for scientific research, Reardon has seen continual interest in this space from early career researchers to those nearing the end of their careers.
“We still need to understand, based on the research we’ve done, what are the best practices, especially given the enormous social consequences and issues posed by AI and genomics and the entanglements of those two fields,” Reardon said. “Most people who get into science do it because they want to make the world a better place, so they really want to think through these issues, but they’re also aware that they’re not necessarily getting all of the types of training they need to do that.”
To that end, all activities related to the project will provide training and networking opportunities for graduate students, postdocs, trainees, and junior researchers. The team aims to build and solidify an emerging network of social scientists, ethicists and scientists committed to creating best practices for collaborating together.
