This talk outlines how the institutions we have built to protect us from the harms of biotechnology are inadequate for today’s challenges and provides a pathway to a new paradigm in biosecurity governance.
What do we need to change about biosecurity governance, and how should we do that? In a recent webinar hosted by Issues in Science and Technology and the Consortium for Science, Policy, & Outcomes, I…
The American Biological Safety Association (ABSA) International is getting serious about biosecurity. Over the last several years, it has initiated the development of a biosecurity credential for…
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…
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…
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…
Every year, the United Nations Biological Weapons Convention has a Meeting of Experts to share updates on developments relevant to the Convention. This year, several colleagues and I presented on…
Last weekend, I attended a conference at Stanford University on “Uncertainty: Ambiguity and doubt in knowledge production”. At it, I presented a paper on how the Wassenaar Arrangement uses ambiguity…
I recently got back from a trip to California, where I met a few people at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Clara’s Center for Science, Technology, and Society, and gave a talk at the James Martin Center for…