Ten years spent circling the concept of dual-use: why biosecurity governance leans so heavily on a duality between legitimate and illegitimate use, read through Foucault’s analysis of othering and power.
I spent this week in Fukuoka, Japan at the World Social Science Forum, a gathering of national and international science academies and other research and professional bodies. At the invitation of the…
This summer, I am a Guest Professor at the University of Vienna’s Department of Science, Technology, and Society. I’ll be teaching a course called, “Making Security: Science, Technology, and the…
Back in 2015, Megan Palmer and I agreed to write a paper as part of an NSF grant on Gene Drives: A Deliberative Workshop to Develop Frameworks for Research and Governance. Over many iterations, we…
There is a significant amount of largely invisible work that gets done within the STS community to keep it going and continuing building it. In an effort to make that work more visible, during the 4S…
The idea that there is a set truth of the world that scientists must identify, codify, and disseminate in full is literally set in stone at the National Academies. It may come as a surprise, then…
The new Handbook of Science and Technology Studies is now available, and I was lucky enough to work with a set of colleagues on a chapter about “Knowledge and Security”.
As we continually develop new areas of technology, how do we think about how that technology might cause harm? In this talk, I draw out some lessons that can be learned from how Americans have built…
Current efforts to limit the dissemination of dual-use biological research results are rooted in simplistic understandings of how such knowledge becomes dangerous. I argue in an article appearing in…
Synthetic biology, from its early stages of development, has had an explicit focus on biosafety and biosecurity concerns. These concerns are being identified and addressed in different ways…