Month: September 2024

Celebrating the social sciences at Imperial

We are now planning our next series of Friday Forums, including one that will focus on the social sciences as a partner to STEM research. Titled ‘Celebrating The Social Sciences at Imperial College’ this keenly-awaited Friday Forum will have three panellists – Diana Varaden, Mike Tennant and Steve Fuller – debating the issue. Traditionally Imperial College, with its focus on the natural sciences, mathematics, engineering and medicine, has not been a place associated with the social sciences and the humanities, although these fields have always maintained a presence. Yet as the impact agenda increases in importance, and complex fields such as climate change and AI accelerate the interdisciplinary gaze of Imperial, the number of social scientists at Imperial, and the value of social science research in our institution, correspondingly increase.

A few months ago I gave a talk to a group of social science-oriented PhD students at Imperial, all of them interested in how best Imperial can support them in their research fields. To an extent I adopted a philosophical approach, as can be seen in the transcript, reproduced below. We can expect in the Friday Forum similar points to be discussed, together with talk of institutional matters concerning how Imperial can put in place structures likely to help the particular research needs of our social scientists.

Talk given by Stephen Webster to PhD students on the relation between the social sciences and the natural sciences, with especial reference to Imperial College

 An historical preamble

The relation between the natural sciences and other arenas of knowledge is a centuries-old issue.  When Sir Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626) made his first attempts to kickstart modern science, three issues preoccupied him. First, he wanted to identify the method of science. Second, he wished to separate science from religion and from classical knowledge. Third, he wanted to establish the utility of science – ‘science for humanity’.

 Bacon did not disguise how difficult it might be to obtain secure scientific knowledge. But he did imply that science was a royal road to truth and that its method was in principle a mechanism for obtaining certainty. He suggested that science, properly performed, was a deductive activity in constant interaction with careful observation. To assist the smooth running of this method, he said, every effort should be made to reduce or eliminate ‘the human touch’.

His motive in all this was partly to do with his own ambition, and partly because he was impressed by the work of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543). A major statesman rather than ‘scientist’ (the word scientist was only coined in the mid-19th century), Bacon was influential in the setting up of the Royal Society, which then as now combined scientific learning with civic, institutional power.

Bacon’s suggestion that with scientific knowledge comes power provides us with a starting point on how to understand the position of the social sciences at Imperial.  For the natural sciences are understood to be interested in the mechanisms of nature – material independent of humans that we convince ourselves can be observed objectively. The social sciences, with their gaze turned to human beings, find themselves embroiled in issues of objectivity. For Bacon, and all those who follow him, a secure sense of objectivity is exactly where the power of science lies. For all social scientists therefore, a considered view on objectivity is a necessity.

The philosophical questions I ask today are well-rehearsed. How objective, really, are the natural sciences? And how non-objective, really, are the social sciences?

The situation at Imperial College

As a social scientist at Imperial College you are not alone. The number of researchers here who incorporate into their work, or attempt to, a degree of social science methodology, is increasing. As today’s meeting shows, there are researchers now at Imperial who are based entirely within social science arenas. Your meeting is prescient because it foregrounds an issue Imperial has never felt it necessary to address specifically: the role of the social sciences in driving, guiding and critiquing the natural sciences.

Several explanations are readily available for what some would call STEM’s reticence in collaborating with the social sciences. In the case of Imperial College our specialisation in STEM results from our origins in the Victorian golden era of advances in science and technology, linked of course to the wealth created by the British empire. The Great Exhibition of 1851, an initiative of Prince Albert, led to the founding of all the institutions of Exhibition Rd. The success and importance of the scientific vision was so obvious that no apology could be needed for a science-specialist research and teaching institution. 

A philosophical detour

Given the success of Imperial College in all areas, including its recent QS classification as second in the world, and first in Europe, its role as a ‘STEM university’ seems beyond challenge. Nevertheless attempts to better articulate the role of the social sciences, in a place like Imperial, are likely to be fruitful, and perhaps even welcomed. Broadly speaking, there are two strategies to follow, in such efforts. One we will describe as epistemological, the other pragmatic. On the first, efforts since the 17th century to downgrade the truth claims of the human sciences in comparison to the natural sciences (the ‘Enlightenment project’, have proved unreliable. Rather, a whole series of philosophers, ranging from Giambattista Vico and David Hume in the 18th century, to Thomas Kuhn, Quine and Russell Hanson in the 20th century, have argued convincingly that scientific knowledge has a profoundly social element. And on the second, and this is a particularly contemporary point, scientific research now, with its ever-growing emphasis on utility and impact, transfers very quickly out of the lab and into the world of human politics, culture and media. We might even talk of scientists having to orientate their work – their knowledge – to a society where trust in institutions and authority seems to be changing. We also know that the laboratory, far from being an austere place of objective fact-finding, is irretrievably social. In sum, there are good philosophical reasons to doubt that scientific knowledge is more foundational than social science knowledge; and there are good reasons to believe that science innovation is impossible now without a corresponding understanding of social processes.

Dr Stephen Webster

Senior Lecturer in Science Communication

Office of the Vice-Provost (Research and Enterprise)/Science Communication Unit

10th June 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ethics and The Good Science Project



When Vice-Provost Mary Ryan said: ‘Yours is an ethics project’, I had to start thinking.

Two years ago I started The Good Science Project. My idea, as told to Mary, was simplicity itself: the research culture in which we flourish will be one where conversation and debate, on contextual issues as well as ‘scientific topics’, are nurtured. I would set up brief, in person, lunch-included, discussion meetings – the Friday Forums. Nothing much, but it would help. At this point Mary said to me ‘That sounds good, this is an ethics project’.

I went away and asked myself: is communication-within-an-institution, however thoughtful and illuminating, a matter of ‘ethics’? Is Mary right?

The history of the phrase ‘research culture’ gives us a clue why the topic might indeed be an ethical issue. For the previous word we used was ‘misconduct’. As I write in a previous blog, the ancestor to our interest in research culture is a concern about trust. At the start of the millennium a number of high-profile cases from across the world made journal editors in particular, and research centres in general, worry about cheating. To a large extent the concern at that time seemed to be trust in individuals. Are some scientists ‘bad apples’, and what should we do about them? The year 2000 was also the time when the House of Lords Science Select Committee produced their epochal Third Report ‘Science and Society’. The report began with statements about a ‘crisis of trust’ in science. No particular mention was made there of misconduct or research culture, but in highlighting the concept of dialogue between science and society, the idea that the internal workings of science has civic relevance was bound to gain ground.

Thus it was that a discourse grew about science ethics being as much about institutions as it is about individuals. In 2002 and 2003 influential MRC scientist Peter Lawrence wrote for Nature magazine well-received articles on publication norms and the nature of scientific esteem. A broad conception of the culture of research institutions was the force of Sir David King’s code of conduct Rigour, Respect and Responsibility in 2007. Perhaps of greatest significance was the Nuffield Council of Bioethics 2014 report The Culture of Scientific Research in the UK, chaired by Professor Ottoline Leyser (who subsequently went on to champion these issues when she became CEO of United Kingdom Research Innovation).

All of us know that ethics is about the difference between right and wrong, about how to separate benefit from harm, and about how to advance justice rather than injustice. But all this is very abstract-sounding. How do ideas like these get traction on a laboratory? If discussions about research culture classify as an ethics project, what precisely should we discuss? Why might people gathering to discuss perspectives on their work, at a lunchtime Friday Forum, be considered to be engaging in an ethics project?

Let’s do some homework. When it comes to serious descriptions of European ethical thought, three strands exist. At the risk of being dull, I will list them. Firstly, there is deontology, or rules-based ethics. Here you know right from wrong because of rules: religious rules; rules which seem self-evident (murder is wrong; dishonesty is wrong); and, famously, ‘the golden rule’: do unto others as you would wish others would do unto you’. The philosopher most associated with rules-based ethics is Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). In science we have plenty of rules: animals, health and safety, and any number of management, HR and policy requirements.

Secondly, there is utilitarianism. This is where you judge an action by its consequences. If, all things considered, the action makes the world a better, happier place, then that action is the right one. A corollary, and a slightly disturbing one, is that the action itself does not carry particular moral weight. For example, perhaps in some circumstances killing, or telling lies, is the right thing to do, because the consequences are seen as so important. Another way of putting this is ‘the ends justifies the means’. Utilitarianism is a 19th century movement especially associated with the social reformers Jeremy Bentham (1746-1832) and J.S.Mill (1806-1873).

In science we are well-practised in using rules-based ethics, and utilitarianism, as groundings for our work. As regards utilitarianism, the resources we put into science are justified because of the future benefits that will accrue to people. Consider our College strategy: it is called ‘Science For Humanity’.

Almost automatically we think of the values of scientific research as founded on rules and on utility. The rules we set ourselves, the truth of the scientific results that we produce, and the likely future value of our work, dominate the stories we tell about our work.

But, just to give us pause, accounts of what scientists value about their work seem not quite captured by concepts of future benefit, or adherence to rules. Scientists on the contrary prefer to describe their enjoyment in their craft skills, in their steady accumulation of knowledge, and in their sense of being in a community where trusted sharing of ideas is a norm. And when they discuss their concerns about the scientific life it is the distorting impact of intense competition, too hard a fight for grants, and fears about a secure future in science research, that gain mention. And the strong sense often is that these drivers, even if accepted as inevitable and manageable, are not considered as central to scientific practice. These are not the aspects of science that make scientists happy, and cause them to think they are making progress in their understanding. Instead they are a distracting burden from the main task, a tax. We can suggest then that there is more to the life scientific than rules and future benefit. And this is where the Good Science Project comes in, and where Mary’s words prompted its strategy.

For it turns out that a third and lesser-known branch of ethics is perhaps best placed for elaborating the actual lives of scientists – virtue ethics. This is a very ancient tributary of ethical thought, stemming from the classical Greeks. Here, it is character that forms the focus, especially as regards a person’s daily commitment to their work and to their growing skills. For example, to use an example from classical Greece, a ‘good’ farmer is one who understands seed and soil behaviour and knows what needs doing when. Getting good at all these things – the steady development of skills and knowledge, and with that the steady growth of reputation – is the ethical ground for this farmer. There is no emphasis on broader rules, or on consequences. In today’s language, you might say that it is the person’s ‘practice’, and the respect it gleans within their professional community, that matters.

For the Good Science Project, virtue ethics provides the best way of responding to Mary Ryan’s declaration, and indeed establishes the point that this is ‘an ethics project’. By finding ways to help scientists articulate those aspects of daily science that normally lie hidden from view – I mean the pleasures of the technical and intellectual challenges of daily science – we can claim to be followers of Socrates and Aristotle, the very founders of European ethics.

A rough guide to ‘research culture’

 

Preamble

No doubt about it, anyone trying to understand the concept ‘research culture’, in particular its problems and its routes to improvement, has their work cut out. In considering research culture, are we likely to find ourselves discussing ethics, or management technique, or HR policy, or diversity and inclusion, or something else entirely? As the Good Science Project moves into its third year I anticipate spending time trying to put order into this unruly list. I remember, at our very first meeting, I discussed the god Perseus, and his way of dealing with the Gorgon by refusing to look directly at those terrifying locks. Instead, by holding up a mirror, he could deal with his problem satisfactorily. Is there a sense in which ‘research culture’ cannot be looked at directly, that like Perseus we must hold up a mirror? This was certainly my thinking in setting up the Triptych of Science art project, where scientists made art works to express their views on their working life.

It always helps discipline the mind when an invitation to give a talk comes your way, and so I was grateful to the United Kingdom Research Integrity Office when it asked me to give a seminar, alongside my ex-student Mun Keat Looi, on the relation between research culture and science communication. I decided to take the opportunity to do some ‘organising’, both of how I see the history of the field, and how I think ‘ethics’ might have a role in issues of research culture. Thus, towards the end of my talk, I began to discuss how virtue ethics – that is, the branch of ethics that considers matters of character and stems from classical Greece – might be for us a key support in our search both for understanding, and for action. My next blog, in fact, will be a detailed look at how ethics, and what aspects of ethics, might illuminate our thoughts about research culture.

 

I reproduce below the briefing notes I provided to UKRIO and the participants of the webinar.

 


Hand-out notes for UKRIO webinar talk by Dr Stephen Webster, Imperial College London. 26th June: ‘Science Communication and Science Integrity’.


Introduction

Science communication is generally considered to be the facilitation of science-society relations, through a number of formats: science journalism, university outreach and communication, policy initiatives and social science research. However, a very important aspect of science communication concerns the issue of how, within a research institution, scientists communicate with each other. Therefore, in today’s webinar, if Mun Keat Looi considers integrity and science journalism as a key external communication issue, I will look at something more internal: integrity and daily laboratory life. While Mun Keat looks at how science journalists manage the various and often conflicting demands of their profession, so I will look at the way research integrity is sometimes vulnerable to the conflicting demands of the life scientific.

A Brief History of Science Integrity

The United Kingdom Research Integrity Office, today’s host of our discussion, was set up in 2006. Fourteen years earlier, in 1992, the US Department of Health had instituted the Office of Research Integrity, in response to anxieties running from the early 1980s about some well-publicised, even sensational, cases of scientific misconduct. An example would be the David Baltimore Affair. Later in 1997, responding also to what was felt to be rising cases of misconduct, all of them quite challenging to deal with, British journal editors, including Richard Horton of The Lancet, set up The Committee on Publication Ethics (‘COPE’). By this time the problem of scientific misconduct was raising serious issues for the journals, for the universities, and indeed for the whole concept of science as a truth-gathering exercise. Quite a range of interesting comment began to accumulate, with the MRC scientist Peter Lawrence FRS being notably influential through his thought-provoking 2002/3 Nature articles ‘Rank Injustice’ and The Politics of Publication. A particularly high-profile case in 2005/6, involving the multiple and well-publicised ethical transgressions of scientist Woo Suk Hwang, can be seen as a defining moment.

Many reports and codes of conduct followed this 2005 watershed. One such code of conduct was Sir David King’s Rigour, Respect and Responsibility, which had its university launch at Imperial College in 2007. In the same year Imperial’s graduate school started its compulsory course ‘Science, Research and Integrity’, where neophyte scientists could discuss these issues, and – very importantly – give their point of view. It was as a result of Sir David King’s work, and courses similar to the one offered by Imperial, that a subtle but important shift occurred. While the misconduct cases we read about in those years seemed always to involve astonishing examples of individual frailty and corruption, leading to the view that we were dealing here with ‘bad apples’, wise heads, including those of PhD students, reminded us that if ethics always has an individual component, the institutional aspect is critically important too. Slowly we moved in the direction of this question: ‘How Can Our Institution Support Good Science?’ Then, in 2014, under the guidance of Professor Ottoline Leyser (now CEO of Research England), the Nuffield Council on Bioethics launched at Imperial College their seminal report ‘The Culture of Scientific Research’. This brave document made plain the issue of institutional responsibility. It asked: how can an institution make unethical behavior less likely? And, particularly, it seemed to imply that we must be as diligent in discussing culture as we are in chasing down example of misconduct. In sum, as I discuss in the webinar, discussions of research integrity have roots in very different styles of discourse: there is an alarm about misconduct, and there is an aspirational, fervent desire for something just as complex, ‘good science’. Does this ‘mix’ of discourse pose problems?

What Does ‘Integrity’ Mean?

While I wouldn’t say that the discourses of ‘misconduct’ and ‘integrity’ are wildly incompatible, some thought is needed over how to navigate a rather heterogeneous set of concepts. And while ‘misconduct’ centres on the transgression of fairly well-defined rules, it is hard to know quite what ‘research culture’ means. For example, should we talk about ‘research cultures’, in the plural? That might look like a good option, but then we remember the important philosophical tradition, still central today, that science is unified: it has a method; it doesn’t matter where you do your science or who you are; a scientific fact is the same, whether you are in Southampton or in Sydney. Culture scholars, however, spend a lot of their time exploring how cultures evolve, and how they remain sustainably different. Meanwhile a growing aspect of enhancing research culture relies on the idea that both in in our wider lives and in our laboratories, identity recognition is central to the flourishing of our working life.

The word ‘integrity’ is usually defined as ‘honesty, the capacity to inspire well-founded trust, a position of moral worth’. However there is a second, equally important meaning. This is to do with wholeness, of different parts within a system being in communication, being in balance, and being mutual, interested and respectful.

Research Integrity and Science Communication

It is this second aspect of the word integrity that forms the basis of my short talk. I will be exploring how concepts like balance, and of course imbalance, are helpful tools in understanding research culture. At Imperial College we have been promoting the idea that research culture (among other things) is a matter of ethics. Similarly, at Imperial, we understand the ethics of research culture as broader than that routinely examined by research ethics committees. As I shall briefly suggest at the end of my talk, to attain the required ethical breadth, more to do with character and habit than with rules and policy, it may be helpful to study the great tradition of Virtue Ethics, stemming from Aristotle and the traditions of classical Athens.

Summer travels

 

Good science and the European dimension

British prime minister Sir Keir Starmer has been travelling this week, aiming, as the media put it, to ‘re-set’ relations with Europe. The self-destructive act of Brexit, while not likely to be undone anytime soon, must plainly be mitigated if our new government is to see the economic growth that forms the basis of its plans.

 

A big headline this week, coming from Starmer, is that perhaps a European youth mobility scheme is back on the agenda. We all know it is important for young Europeans to experience life in another country. This is not migration. Let’s call it growing up, or simply growing a better world. In an interesting accident of timing Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, that great poem to human unity, has just had its annual performance up the road from Imperial College, at the BBC Proms.

 

For the Good Science Project, the link between travel and science, between research and new perspectives, is endlessly interesting. Our first Friday Forum last year, titled Nauka Emigrantka, looked at the joys and the perils of migrating for your science. Chaired by science journalist Urszula Kaczorowska, a staffer at the Polish Press Agency, this was a fascinating panel discussion about the challenges a scientist faces, when they move their research to another country.

 

As the Good Science Project moves into its third year, I hope we can grow links with other European countries, and travel more,  both physically and intellectually. Certainly the desire to enhance research culture is not simply a British preoccupation. The distortions scientists sometimes suffer, from the competitive hunt for grants or from the insecurities of employment and publication, are found across the continent.

 

The Good Science Project in Krakow

Can we learn from our European colleagues, as we try to understand better the social, economic and political forces that impact on scientists? Last summer I co-directed, with Urszula Kaczorowska, a summer school in Krakow, at the invitation of the Jagiellonian University. We worked with social science doctoral students, nurturing the communication skills young academics need if they are to flourish. Because they were social science students, their research areas often touched on the fractured nature of European politics.

 

Each morning of the Summer School, Urszula probed the students’ research. What was their project? How does it work? Why does it matter? Listening to Urszula’s interviews I felt I was experiencing in real time the basic tenets of the Good Science Project: that when it comes to research we always will find that the character of the scientist – their persistence, their care, their ingenuity – has powerful relevance. So often, in laboratory life, the gaze turns exclusively to publications, grants won, and the frailties of collaboration. It was a great discovery too, to see how much the students enjoyed and benefited from those conversations with Urszula, feeling – rightly – that such supportive but critical scrutiny itself is a boon to their research. At the same time they were learning the best ways for academics and journalists to interact.

 

Thinking of that wonderful Summer School in Krakow, it is clear why Poland is a good country for a science communication partnership with Imperial College. Like the United Kingdom, a change of government in Poland has brought a sea-change in official attitudes to Europe and the EU. Today, from opposite ends of the continent we in the UK and colleagues in Poland look across at each other, and perceive in the land between us not zones of national fervour, but routes to a shared wealth. No doubt an element of that wealth will be the common benefit that good science brings.

 

In 2021 Imperial College signed an agreement – a Letter of Understanding – with four Polish Universities. Together we would explore ways of spurring on progress in science communication. The agreement was a success, with meetings in Poznan, Krakow and Warsaw. Back at Imperial, Gareth Mitchell, Urszula Kaczorowska and myself, looking for ways to capture good practice in science communication training, made the Minding Science podcasts. Meanwhile feelers are out also with the Medical University of Gdansk, the Pomeranian University of Słupsk and the Wrocław University of Science and Technology. Let’s see what happens.

 

A philosophical epilogue

There are philosophical reasons too why those interested in innovation in science communication might be drawn to Poland and other Central European countries. For in this area of Europe, over the last 100 years, two vital philosophical developments gave us new ways to look at science. Interestingly, the two developments seem at odds with each other. On the one hand, partly in response to the programmes of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, scientists, mathematicians and philosophers, many of them fleeing west, looked for ways of detaching science from society and from culture, so that research could never again be abused and shaped by dictators. Yet, on the other hand, our contemporary belief that science is inseparable from society also has origins in Poland and its neighbouring countries. Think of the Polish physician and microbiologist Ludwick Fleck (1896-1961), a survivor of Auschwitz, who argued that scientific facts take shape through the collective processes of belief and social interaction. For Fleck, scientific knowledge is as much social construction as it is the mechanical collection of data and the blunt comparison of theory. If Fleck is an obscure name to us today, his vast influence is obvious once we remember that his work was known to Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996). Kuhn’s 1962 text The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is today recognised as the epochal moment when science was pushed back into the embrace of society – sometimes an unwilling embrace, but an embrace nonetheless.

Another Central European philosopher-scientist, Hungarian chemist Michael Polanyi (1861-1976), was also a forerunner of  Kuhn. In his 1958 book Personal Knowledge Polanyi wrote that scientific thought and practice are guided and even fixed by tacit understanding and by personal styles of thought and expression. These social and personal aspects of the scientific project, argued Polanyi, are central to scientific advance, but are not easily reduced to objective foundations of data gathering and theory testing.

These rich intellectual traditions of Poland and its neighbours, both pulling science into society, and also separating it from society, remain pressing and central tensions for science communicators. For it is science communicators who we rely upon to navigate a safe path through social issues as well as through scientific issues. Science journalists, in other words, are not simply transmitters of information, or informal educationalists. When they work properly, these communicators are agents of science-society enrichment, and are very much needed. Science communicators must continue to look across Europe, learning from each other, and developing their philosophical, social and technical understanding of the scientific world-view.