Thinking on the Edge

Democracy in the contemporary

life sciences
Nikolas Rose
Department of Social Science, Health and Medicine, School of Social Science and Public Policy, King’s College
London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK.
E-mail: nikolas.rose@kcl.ac.uk

A version of this lecture was published in German in M. Hagner (ed.) ‘Wissenscaft und Demokratie’,
Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012.

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Abstract In this article I reflecton the contemporary arguments for democratisation of
science, in light of the work of the historian of the life sciences Ludwik Fleck. I explore some
possible reasons for the current demands for ‘responsibility’ among scientific researchers, and

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briefly consider this in the context of the various arguments that have made a link between
democracy and science, or considered the role of science in a democratic society. I conclude by
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considering some recent proposals for opening up the secluded spaces of scientific research and truth
finding, and suggest that, far from destabilising scientific truth, such developments might actually
address the well known failures of ‘translation from bench to bedside’, and make scientific truth
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claims in the life sciences more robust when they leave the lab and enter the world of everyday life.
BioSocieties advance online publication, 26 November 2012. doi:10.1057/biosoc.2012.26
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Keywords: Democracy; Ludwik Fleck; thought styles; citizenship; truth

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Early on 13 June 2011, the BBC radio ‘Today’ programme carried an item on science as it
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often does in its 6:50 a.m. slot – usually reporting a ‘breakthrough’ that a university press
release claims will change our lives.1 This often turns out to be results from a preliminary
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experiment on 18 rats, which places the unfortunate researcher in the awkward position of
defending the claim of imminent clinical relevance to humans. This item was different – it
was about science itself. Science, said the presenter, is supposed to be open, transparent,
trustworthy, self-critical and so forth. But is it? And why is the Royal Society, the oldest
scientific academy on the planet, conducting an enquiry into the state of scientific debate?2
Well, the Chairman of the enquiry replied, the world has changed and science must change
along with it. Partly as a result of the enormous success of science and its impact on everyday

1 This is a revised and corrected version of the article given, in a shorter form, at the Science and
Democracy: A symposium to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Ludwik Fleck’s death – the Latsis
Symposium 2011 – in Zurich, 26–28 May 2011. I have kept the spoken form in this written version.
2 The details of this project, which is entitled Science as a Public Enterprise, can be found at http://
royalsociety.org/policy/projects/science-public-enterprise/report/. Professor Geoffrey Boulton FRS is the
chair of the Working Group. I quote him here from memory, and not verbatim.

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life. Partly because our democratic societies have lost the older habits of deference, and
citizens no longer accept the old cliché ‘trust me, I’m a scientist’. Therefore science
in democracies has to make sure that public trust is maintained. And to do this, it must
‘engage people’ and become ‘open’, for example, by putting all the data on which claims are
made into the public domain, so they can be verified, not only by other scientists, but even,
perhaps, by members of the public themselves. Open science? Democratic science?3 What is
it with the sciences these days – from climate change to neuroscience, from nanotechnology
to synthetic biology – that they have become such a repository of hopes and expectations,
hype and disappointment, coupled with the repeated demand for the ‘engagement’ of ‘the
general public’? Let me give some examples from my own experience.
I have recently been working with some of the United Kingdom’s leading biological
engineers and system biologists seeking to develop ‘synthetic biology’.4 The condition of the
grant of several million pounds from the United Kingdom’s Engineering and Physical Science
Research Council was that social scientists were to be involved from the very start –

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‘upstream’ as the jargon has it. Arising from this, my colleagues and I were asked to write a
report by the United Kingdom’s Royal Society on the ‘governance’ of synthetic biology;
despite the fact that this field of work is in its infancy, and there are real doubts as to whether
it will ever be realistic to ‘engineer’ biology in this way.5 There are, I discovered, already

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29 reports on governance and ethics in synthetic biology from committees in many countries,
each having views about ‘the concerns of the public’, and all saying essentially the same
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thing. I am a member of numerous bodies set up by august organisations like the Academy of
Medical Sciences exploring issues such as the regulation of experiments involving animals
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containing human materials – humanised mice for drug testing, primates with human genes
for susceptibility to Parkinson’s.6 Each committee is made up of scientists, active and retired,
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philosophers, policymakers, regulators, and – yes – even social scientists. Each is obliged to
carry out a programme of public dialogue – in the United Kingdom this is organised by an
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organisation called ‘Sciencewise’, which brands itself ‘the UK’s national centre for public
dialogue in policy making involving science and technology issues’.7 Sciencewise was set up
by the UK Government after a Report of our House of Lords calling for ‘much more
meaningful engagement between scientists, policy makers and the public on emerging
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scientific issues’.8 I am also a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics: every country
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3 There are, of course, different and perhaps incompatible conceptions of ‘democratic’ science at work here
– in one, scientific practice is somehow to be regulated by the citizenry and responsible to them, but still
created by ‘elites’. In another, the truths of sciences are somehow to be co-produced by and with that
citizenry – perhaps by opening the data, perhaps by relying on ‘citizen science’ and all that work of
amateur scientists that is so prevalent from bird watching to amateur astronomy. This aspect was discussed
in a paper by Andrew Abbott at the conference where this article was given. Amateur science, especially in
the life sciences, generates a fear about certain ‘anti-democratic’ consequences of research in unregulated
environments free from the usual controls, as in worries over DIY-bio and garage biology in the area of
synthetic biology.
4 This is in the work of the Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation, details can be found at http://
www3.imperial.ac.uk/syntheticbiology.
5 This report on The Transnational Governance of Synthetic Biology can be found at: http://royalsociety.org/
uploadedFiles/Royal_Society/Policy_and_Influence/2011-05-20_RS_BIOS_Transnational_Governance.pdf.
6 This report on Animals Containing Human Materials can be found at: http://www.acmedsci.ac.uk/
p47prid77.html.
7 For Sciencewise, see www.sciencewise-erc.org.uk.
8 http://www.sciencewise-erc.org.uk/cms/background.

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has to have a bioethics council it seems, and each is charged with considering the social,
ethical, legal and regulatory issues surrounding ‘emerging biotechnologies’ – as the
expression now has it – from nanotechnologies to neuroscience.9 What is it with science
these days and in particular with the life sciences and their ‘emerging technologies’ that has
called for all this activity? If all these commissions, working parties, reports and activities are
attempts at some kind of a solution, what is the problem?
These are only one dimension of the multiple forces that now encircle the work of
researchers, seeking to shape the paths taken, or not taken. There are the funding agencies
and their current obsession with the imperative of translation – that research should sup-
port continuous ‘innovation’ to meet ‘societal challenges’ – both to public well-being and to
national competiveness. For these funders, it seems, scientists can only justify their receipt of
public and charitable funds in a democratic society if they can deliver findings that will
contribute pretty damn soon to the health and wealth of the nation. The translational
imperative reaches far wider. In the new scientific life (Shapin, 2008) the obsession with

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a quid pro quo between investment and translation into intellectual property and products
runs from University technology transfer departments to venture capitalists. In a famous
episode in 1952, Jonas Salk was questioned by Edward R. Murrow on national TV the day
after the announcement that the polio vaccine he had developed was safe and effective. Who

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owned the patent asked Murrow. Salk replied ‘Well, the people I would say. There is no patent.
Could you patent the sun?’ (Smith, 1990).10 Today, the situation is perhaps better captured in
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the title of a 2003 ‘action plan’ prepared by the Danish Minister for Research and Innovation:
‘New roads between research and business – from thought to invoice’ (‘Fra tanke til faktura’).11
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The landscape of research is now charted, predicted, scoped, horizon scanned, subjected to
foresight exercises by a plethora of outfits seeking to advise businesses and investors on areas of
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the most rapid potential market growth, thus exercising a performative impact on the paths
down, which research develops, shaping the facts and explanations that enter the true, and the
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technologies that impact, sometimes irreversibly, on our lives.

Fleck himself commented on these relations between science and industry in one of his last
essays, entitled ‘Crisis in Science’ written in 1960. He suggested that because scientists chose,
officially, to ignore the shaping of their forms of knowledge by the thought collective
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of which they formed a part, they became victims of that thought collective, unable to
think beyond it. A knowledge of the history of styles of thought among scientists them-
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selves, he suggested, would turn ‘[s]cientific truth y from something stiff and stationary
into dynamic, developing, creative human truth’ (Fleck, 1986 [1960]). I will return to this
optimistic suggestion later. But perhaps these new entanglements – where science is seen as
corruptible by money – are one dynamic creating the contemporary ecosystem in which
science has to survive – one that Fleck could hardly envisage. In the life sciences over the
last two decades, the bioethicists have become key participants in this encirclement – not just
those philosophers seeking to create a social role, a career path and an authoritative

9 For the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, see: www.nuffieldbioethics.org.

10 Quoted from Triggle (2004, p. 139). The clip from the Murrow interview is available on YouTube at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHGKLbDt_2Q&eurl=http://www.michaelmoore.com/sicko/dvd/
extras.html.
11 http://fivu.dk/publikationer/2003/nye-veje-mellem-forskning-og-erhverv-fra-tanke-til-faktura, accessed
March 2011.

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profession, but also those other amateurs who get drawn into these regulatory activities.
The ecosystem is populated by many other actors. There are campaigners for research and
funding for this or that condition – biosocial groups as Rabinow might term them who
organise a political and perhaps a personal identity around ‘their disease’ (Rabinow, 1996;
Gibbon and Novas, 2008). There are campaigners against this or that medical abuse – breast
implants that have failed, drug companies who collude with doctors in ‘dispensing with the
truth’ or prescribing ‘bitter pills’ that not only don’t cure but actually harm (Fried, 1998;
Mundy, 2001). There are journalists, social scientists and indeed some medical researchers
who accuse the industries of subverting the process of academic publishing by using
apparently objective scientific papers as marketing devices, of ‘selling sickness’ and foisting
invented illnesses upon unwitting individuals; and much more (Moynihan and Cassels, 2005).
Some suggest that this new agonistic landscape can itself be an advance for democracy – that
the people themselves, those directly affected by scientific developments, have found their
voice and use their democratic powers to help shape or contest the direction of research and

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technological development (Heath et al, 2004). I will come back to that claim presently.
And if this was not enough, looking over everyone’s shoulders are the practitioners of
science and technology studies, for whom every truth claim is an expression of the beliefs
of a scientific community, bolstered by its internal structures of apprenticeship, hierarchy

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and authority, reflecting and serving their social interests, maintained though experimental
practices that have, in many cases, become self-vindicating, where positions triumph in
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controversies in ways that owe little to the principles of rationality portrayed in the
normative texts of the philosophy of science (Jasanoff, 2001; Hackett, 2007; Lynch, 2012).
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For most of them, contra Fleck, scientific epistemology is closed and not open, and sociology
and history shows that scientific truths are far from ‘dynamic, developing, human truths’.
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Pity the naı̈ve researcher, believing she is pursuing a noble goal of truth to nature, for the
greater benefit of humankind.
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I simplify and caricature, of course. But still, one might ask, how has one got to this point.
Is this all just a manifestation of some global decline of deference, a loss of trust in authority,
or the rise of new modes of ‘active citizenship’? And has any of this got anything to do with
democracy?
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Democracy
So let me turn to democracy. I am tempted to begin by adapting some words of the great
political analyst Robert Zimmerman: Democracy, I spoke this word as if a wedding vow; ah
but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.12 What would, or could, one
mean by democracy in science? For are not scientific truths of necessity the product of an
elite, trained in a Denkstil, members of a Denkkollectiv, making use of certain exotic ‘set
ups’ that enable things to manifest themselves in ways that they would not outside the
laboratory, and that often, if not always, require a break away from the concrete, from the
obvious and the immediately visible, from common sense, which can provide only a set of
‘epistemological obstacles’? And whatever we know about the ‘social shaping’ of scientific

12 With apologies to Bob Dylan, who was, of course, speaking of equality.

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knowledge, everything we understand about those practices we call science makes them,
in their epistemology, their forms of life, their styles of thought and practices for production
of truth – ‘anti-democratic’.
Therefore by democracy we might mean a situation where the power of decision rests with
‘the people’ as a whole, either directly or via their elected representatives or even by those
who are now termed ‘stakeholders’, no wonder that those who hold to a view of science as
other than opinion or belief or moral conviction, dependent on esoteric training and mastery
of a specialised corpus and all the rest shudder at the very idea of a ‘democratic’ science and
point to those many well worked examples of the corruption of truth by power, its denial
and persecution by prejudice. And yet – unless one is to assume that all the activities of
‘public engagement in science’ I have alluded to are solutions in search of a problem rather
than the other way around – it is clear that something has changed in the politics of truth – at
least in the sciences of life – that demands an answer.

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Active biological citizens, truth and democracy
Perhaps, in part, this is a response to the rise of active biological citizenship. Adriana Petryna
used the term ‘biological citizen’ in her study of post-Chernobyl Ukraine (Petryna, 2002).
The government of the newly independent Ukraine based its claims to a right to govern on

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the democratically expressed will of its citizens. And those citizens who claimed to have been
exposed to the radiation effects of the nuclear explosion at the Chernobyl reactor, believed
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that they had rights to health services and social support, which they could claim from that
government in the name of their damaged biological bodies: ‘the very idea of citizenship is
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now charged with the superadded burden of survival y a large and largely impoverished
segment of the population has learned to negotiate the terms of its economic and social
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inclusion using the very constituent matter of life’. These citizenship campaigns did not seek
to democratise biological science, but to use it as a resource in demands for compensation
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for a ‘state of injury’ for which others – and ultimately the State itself – was responsible.
Scientific truth in the service of a demand from below – scientific truth as a weapon against
political expediency – or, in cases such as Bhopal, as a weapon against commercial
corruption and intransigence – a kind of democratic scientific activism, in which the truth of
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science is to resolve controversies and hold the powerful to account in the name of the ‘vital
rights’ of the citizen. If the truth itself can speak, it will be on the side of justice: perhaps that
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hope is even more naı̈ve than a previous slogan – that the truth is always revolutionary.
Deborah Heath, Rayna Rapp and Karen-Sue Taussig frame the relations between truth
and democracy somewhat differently, in their account of ‘genetic citizenship’: a way of
understanding the role of genetics in human health and human capacities. They argue that
developments in genetics are not just engendering new ways to manage procreation, but also
giving rise to ‘new forms of democratic participation, blurring the boundaries between state
and society, and between public and private interests’ (Heath et al, 2004, p. 152). This is
manifested in new forms of collectivisation, new forums for debate, new styles of activism,
demands for access to knowledge and for the funding of research into specific conditions: ‘it
is “genetic citizenship” that connects discussions of rights, recognitions, and responsibilities
to intimate, fundamental concerns about heritable identities, differential embodiment, and
an ethics of care’ (2004, p. 57, emphasis in original). They argue that such activism is not
passive in the face of scientific truth, but actively seeks to shape the direction of its
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development – using democratic rights to lobby for funding for research into ‘their’ disease,
funding or even starting enterprises to carry out such research in the search for a cure. Here,
at least where lives are at stake, the potential users or beneficiaries from scientific truths have
acquired a kind of right to demand that investment in truth production serves their priorities,
and not those of profit or scientific curiosity or professional advancement.
Democracy of a sort, then, and one should not underestimate the power of such
movements, especially when linked up with the new technologies of the internet and their
use to construct powerful social networks among ‘PatientsLikeMe’, which also make a claim
to democracy.13 Yet these movements run counter to another sense of democracy as placing
all citizens on an equal footing. They depend on citizens who have the capacities to mobilise,
and the kinds of ailments that attract public attention, sympathy and demands for action –
and these depend crucially upon prevailing cultural values that may elevate children above
adults, women above men, youth against the elderly and so forth. In such activism at the
frontiers of biomedical research, all citizens are far from equally represented (Rose and

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Novas, 2004).14 Further, while seeking to shape the path of truth towards the hopes of those
seeking to benefit from it, they leave the truth status of that knowledge untouched.
Here, the translational imperative may play a positive role – or rather the failure to
translate and its implications. The central flaw in half a century of heavily funded research in

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what we have now come to term biomedicine – the belief that medical advances will flow
from an understanding of basic biological mechanisms – is the persistent failure to translate
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from the laboratory to the real world. Some movements of active biological citizenship
address this, when they refuse to leave the laboratory itself intact. Who has the right to
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evaluate a truth claim, they ask, and where should that truth claim be evaluated? If we take
an area such as psychiatry, the growth of the movements of users and survivors of psychiatry
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has begun to raise these questions – along with many other critics of course (Newnes et al,
1999). For all those psychopharmaceuticals, apparently having gone through the trials of
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truth in the laboratories of big pharma, in the evidence-based medicine of all the phases of
clinical trials, in the tribunals of the regulators, prove not only to fail to ameliorate the
conditions for which they are prescribed, but often to do as much harm as good, if not more
(Bentall, 2009). Bad practice, inadequate trials, docile and uncritical scientific peers,
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commercial secrecy, supine regulators and downright corruption are part of that story,
of course. But also, perhaps as fundamental, there is the question of where truth is to
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be adjudicated – in the secluded and radically simplified world of the laboratory, the
experiment, the purified practices of the trial, and the correlation coefficients and odds ratios
of the scientific paper, or in the real, messy, complex, everyday lives of the patients, who
have histories that would probably rule them out of the very trials that claim to judge the
therapies they are given, who are subjected to polypharmacy, who regard the so-called ‘side
effects’ as important as the ‘main effects’, and who are making a judgement about a life to be
lived, not a drug to be deemed ‘effective’.15 Democracy, if that it be, here demands a more
radical challenge to the Denkstils, Denkkollectivs, and indeed to the very practices of truth
production and veridication themselves.

13 For PatientsLikeMe, see www.patientslikeme.com.

14 At the conference where this article was given, this aspect was tellingly analysed by Ilana Löwy.
15 On the laboratory as a secluded space, see Callon et al (2009).

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Making democratic scientific citizens

This is a prime example of the reversibility of relations of power. Those who are constituted
as subjects of biomedical practices say something like ‘if your practices and interventions
claim to be for our benefit, by virtue of that alone, we acquire a right to have a say in judging
that benefit, the truth claims that purport to substantiate it, and the priorities that underpin
it’. We do not need a ‘theory’ of resistance to understand such developments; this is merely
the turning back of practices of subjectification upon themselves. For more than a century,
from racial science, through eugenics, strategies of hygienism, to the present, citizenship
practices in the field of health have sought to produce biological citizens who think of their
identity, act on themselves and manage themselves partly in bodily and biological terms
(Rose and Novas, 2004). Today, authorities oblige citizens to take active responsibility for
maintaining, safeguarding and promoting their own health – the kinds of corporeal prudence
and that I have termed ‘somatic individuality’ (Novas and Rose, 2000; Rose, 2001, 2007).
A democracy, policymakers argue, imposes obligations along with rights – active responsible

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biological citizens must acquire biomedical literacy, and engage in a constant work of
self-evaluation and the modulation of conduct, diet, lifestyle and drug regime, in response to
the requirements of the susceptible body. This is the ethic that underpins the new movements

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that organise their politics around a shared biological identity.
Over the twentieth century there were many passionate advocates for the creation of
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a kind of scientific citizenship, which was to be achieved by making the discoveries of science
available to the masses. Many were socialists and radicals: one only has to think of books
like Lancelot Hogben’s Science for the Citizen of 1938 or J. D. Bernal’s The Social Function
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of Science of 1939.16 Scientific literacy and social justice were fused together, but while
science would be on the side of progress and justice, this did not mean that the internal truth
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claims of scientific knowledge were to be adjudicated democratically. Radicals in the post-

war period continued this tradition, arguing for ‘the social responsibility of science’
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especially in the wake of debates about the role of scientists in the development of nuclear
weapons (Rose and Rose, 1969).17 These explicitly political endeavours sought simulta-
neously to criticise those truth claims that were held to be ideological on account of their
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role in supporting class divisions, racism and sexual discrimination – for example in relation
to IQ – and to demand scientific priorities responsive to the need for social justice rather
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than private profit, military superiority or individual careers.

There was also a repetitive concern with ‘science for the citizen’ from policymakers
seeking support for the investment in science that they considered vital for national
advancement. In the United States, in 1959, the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee
asserted that: ‘A democratic citizenry today must understand science in order to have a wide
and intelligent democratic participation in many national decisions. Such decisions are being
made now’ (quoted from DuS, 1961). This was in a report on Education for the Age of
Science, which in the words of an Editorial entitled ‘Science for the Citizen’ in Science
2 years later, argued that ‘if science is to have the kind of support that is essential to its
vigorous development, improved ways must be found to increase public understanding of

16 At the conference, this aspect was explored in detail by Marianne Sommer, focussing on the work of the
‘triple H’ – Julian Huxley, J. B. S. Haldane and Lancelot Hogben – and their ‘scientific humanism’.
17 For example, the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science which was established in 1969.

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what science and technology can do, of how they are carried out, and of the importance
of basic research for its own sake and as the indispensible foundation for an advancing
technology’ (ibid.) – a task, they suggested, might best be carried out by science writers,
commentators and programme makers in the mass media. What was required, it seemed was
better ‘Public Understanding of Science’. Almost quarter of a century later, the United
Kingdom’s Royal Society argued in very similar terms that there was public disinterest in,
and distrust of, science arising largely from lack of knowledge and the fact that scientists
were poor at communicating their work to the public (Royal Society, 1985). By this time
a whole host of social scientists, students of science and technology studies, and critics of
various stripes were deriding these programmes for ‘public understanding of science’ as
inadequate, serving a function of legitimation, embodying a ‘deficit’ model of the public,
which was to be filled via communication and much more (Gregory and Miller, 1998;
Sturgis and Allum, 2004). This critique of the assumption that the problem was one of public
ignorance intertwined with a range of other events that cast doubt on the authority of

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scientific judgement – controversies over mad cow disease, genetically modified organisms
and other issues that were crucial to citizens because their life and death seemed to be
at stake. One response has been the landscape of commissions, working parties, reports,
enquiries and activities that I sketched earlier: the move from ‘public understanding of
science’ to ‘public engagement’ (Gregory and Lock, 2008).

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Even where the research itself might be designated as ‘basic’ – such as the sequencing of
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the human genome – the focus now is firmly on the actual or potential technological
consequences. Perhaps this is because the research itself always seeks to justify the
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investment of public funds in terms of future ‘beneficial consequences’. Indeed the attempt
to develop new methods of involving citizens is a response to the widely perceived failure of
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the ELSI programme that accompanied the Human Genome Project and its potential
‘translation’ into public benefits. This ELSI research – the acronym stands for Ethical, Legal
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and Social Implications – apparently originated from an off-the-cuff declaration by James

Watson: in response to some hostile questioning from reporters about the social aspects of
the Human Genome Programme he declared that some 5 per cent of the funding would be
devoted to such research.18 This ELSI programme is now widely criticised for ignoring
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the priorities and assumptions built into the science itself, for its focus only on ‘implications’,
for failing to shape either science or policy, or even to predict the nature or consequences of
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scientific and technological developments (Fisher, 2005).

The ‘post-ELSI’ initiatives that followed seldom frame themselves in terms ‘democratising
science’: they term themselves participatory technology assessment, anticipatory governance,
constructive technology assessment, interactive technology assessment, real-time technology
assessment, upstream public engagement and technology appraisal. And they make use of a
range of methods, including consensus conference, citizens juries, stakeholder workshops,
deliberative polling and public dialogues. In each case, involving ‘the public’ is to be part of
the answer. But why? As Claire Marris and I put it in a recent paper ‘In some cases, they
reflect the [normative] belief that citizens who will be affected by decisions have the right
to participate in those decisions, especially when the research is funded by their tax

18 For the official account of the ELSI programme, see http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_

Genome/research/elsi.shtml and www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/elsi/elsi.shtml.

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contributions y . In other cases, they reflect a [instrumental] desire to reduce conflict, help
(re)build trust, and smooth the way for new innovations y . And in still others, they reflect
the [substantive] assumption that such participation from people who will use and/or be
affected by a technology will raise questions about the real life functioning of developments
when they leave the laboratory, perhaps leading to innovations that perform better in
complex real-world conditions, or that may be more socially, economically, and
environmentally viable’ (Marris and Rose, 2010). Indeed, as in all actually existing
democratic mechanisms, it is difficult to decide how to constitute ‘the public’: everyone, all
adults of voting age, randomly selected citizens, those with particular interests or kinds of
knowledge, those with (or without) strong prior views, those who are specially affected
groups such as patients or farmers?
These attempts to shape the path of technological developments in the light of
deliberations about future consequences fall foul of what is conventionally termed the
‘Collingridge dilemma’: the social consequences of a technology cannot be predicted early in

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the life of the technology. By the time undesirable consequences are discovered the
technology is often so much part of the whole economic and social fabric that its control is
extremely difficult. Collingridge termed this ‘the dilemma of control’. When change is easy,
the need for it cannot be foreseen; when the need for change is apparent, change has become

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expensive, difficult and time consuming. Bold claims of future benefits made by those
promoting particular kinds of research are rarely realised in practice. Significant medium-
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term side effects are rarely either predictable or predicted. The actual consequences
of technological developments, even if beneficial, often diverge greatly from predictions, and
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the determinant of these pathways is rarely to be found in the science or technology itself.
They arise from concatenations of social, economic and technical forces that are hard to map
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out in advance. For these reasons, Collingridge argued that we needed a theory of decision
making under ignorance: ‘Since the future is extremely uncertain, options which allow the
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decision maker to respond to whatever the future brings are to be favoured’ (Collingridge,
1980).
Perhaps it is in response to such difficulties that a new phrase has come to the fore:
‘responsible innovation’.19 It is hard to argue for irresponsible innovation, of course. But
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what is meant by responsible? Responsible to whom? And responsible how? Responsibility,

as it seems to be understood here, has something to do with the future – the cry is to
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take responsibility for that future by risk assessment and risk management ‘upstream’ – at
an early stage in the pathways. Advocates for this notion argue that it implies ‘anticipatory
and adaptive approaches that promote the responsible emergence of new technologies
in democratic societies’ in which social scientists work with researchers themselves to
encourage ‘reflexivity, help them to identify potential future environmental, health related,
social and ethical impacts of their work, assess their risks, and modulate or reshape their
research trajectories in this light’ (Owen and Goldberg, 2010, p. 1699). By these means, such
advocates believe, one can avoid foreclosing future options by current decisions, use
public engagement to explore the values and assumptions underpinning different choices in
technology development, the paths not taken as well as the paths envisaged, and to ensure

19 See, for example, the presentations at a Franco-British workshop on Responsible Innovation: From concepts
to practice, held in May 2011, available at: www.ambafrance-uk.org/Franco-British-workshop-on,18791.

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 Rose

that choices for research investment and development are not left to those whose self-interest
they serve, but are openly, rigorously and publicly justified and dispassionately evaluated
(Stirling, 2008).
But the self-doubting has already begun. Although the idea of responsibility for the future
was perhaps most tellingly articulated by Hans Jonas (1984), some suggest that the very idea
of taking responsibility for an uncertain and unknowable future makes no sense, and can
only be rhetorical (Rabinow, 2008). Others doubt whether such engagements
will genuinely open up, rather than close down and legitimate, pathways of scientific
and technological development given the power of the forces, in particular the economic and
financial forces, and their anticipations of returns that shape them.20
Are all those commissions, working parties and the like that take up so much time and
energy merely vehicles for the careers and status of superannuated philosophers, scientists
with a conscience to demonstrate, social scientists in search of grants, convenient ways
for politics to distance itself, manage and contain potential overflows from contro-

PY
versial science, mere legitimating exercises in the politics and economics of contemporary
biotechnology? Such a judgement would be harsh, or at least partial. At a time when the
‘bio’ has become so central to our forms of life, we should not be surprised that those who
would govern biotechnologies try to devolve the adjudication of impossible dilemmas to

O
others, look to bioethicists to provide ethical clearance, and endeavour to transform
problematic ethical issues into technical questions, for example through the bureau-
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cratisation of autonomy by means of the apparatus of ‘informed consent’. Alongside the urge
to critique, perhaps we need to attend to what is manifested in this demand for engagement,
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dialogue and the like.
In the area of the life sciences, I think we can locate this intertwining of the biological and
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the ethical along a dimension that I have termed elsewhere ‘ethopolitics’: the politics of life
itself and how it should be lived (Rose, 1999). Ethopolitical disputes concern the sentiments,
TH

virtues, guiding beliefs of persons, groups or institutions, the means by which human beings
should judge themselves and act upon themselves to make themselves better than they are.
In this sense, we should think of bioethics differently – not as normative moral principles but
in terms of the ethical considerations deemed relevant by participants – not just patients and
U

their families, but also researchers, clinicians, regulators and even those working in the
world of commerce – in their actual conduct of themselves and their lives in relation to the
A

dilemmas that they face and the judgements and decisions that they must make. Studies of
these actors do not reveal an ethics-free zone, energised only by narrow sectional interests
and calculations of financial or other gains. The authorities and professionals enmeshed in
contemporary vital politics, while they may have their own share of cynicism, pragmatism,
ambition, greed and rivalry, are also inescapably searching for, assembling and inventing ways in
which they might evaluate, adjudicate and ethically justify the decisions they must make when
human vitality is at stake. In this sense, while not exactly democratic, the work of these
committees directly addresses the values we wish to live by, the kinds of science that might bring
about the forms of life we wish to inhabit – at their best, they are engaged in a politics of the
future, of the kinds of persons we want to be and the kinds of lives we want to lead.

20 Some of these criticisms are discussed by Joyce Tait (2009) also available at www.nature.com/embor/
journal/v10/n1s/full/embor2009138.html.

10 r 2012 The London School of Economics and Political Science 1745-8552 BioSocieties 1–14
 Democracy in the contemporary life sciences

Conclusion: Democracy and Epistemology

In the affirmative reading of Fleck’s epistemology by Cornelius Borck, Fleck’s anti-realism is

linked to an historical process that guards against relativism and teleology, and opens to
democracy. Referring to Fleck’s paper of 1929, Borck writes that for Fleck ‘the democratic
competition between different styles of thought, the different forms of knowledge, set the
sciences free from “emotions” and “mysticism” to the “never ending labour” of shaping
a “democratic reality” y . He aimed at fostering a belief in science as the way towards
democracy’ (Borck, 2004). The democratic contestation, though taking place in particular
socio-historical circumstances, was an internal one, made possible by the openness of
scientific thought itself, despite the apparent implications of the conception of thought
collectives, which suggest closure, resistance and what Fleck spoke of elsewhere as the
‘tendency to reify and objectivize the conceptual creations of scientific thought’ (Fleck, 1979
[1935], p. 144).

PY
Today, however, the reifying tendencies in scientific truth claims are contested in ways not
envisaged by Fleck. The landscape of scientific research, at least in the life sciences and
biomedicine, is characterised by conflict, dispute and contestation, not just over implications
but over the direction of research and its priorities, and, perhaps most fundamentally, over

O
truths themselves. I have already remarked on the ambiguous democratic consequences of
the shaping of the paths of research and innovation by groups campaigning for attention to
C
their own particular disease, helping select out of all the candidates for truth, those that
actually do enter into the truth and have the consequences that attach to such truth. In some
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cases at least, such movements embody a more fundamental challenge to the mechanisms of
truth production and veridication from those who claim that truth claims should be
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adjudicated in their messy world of everyday life, and not in the secluded world of
the laboratory and the experiment, purified of all the interference that characterises life
TH

beyond the lab.

Michel Callon and his colleagues have valorised such movements in their arguments for
technical democracy (Callon et al, 2009). In the hybrid forums that have taken shape around
genetically modified organisms, gene therapy, BSE and the like, they argue, science and
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technology overflows the boundaries of existing frameworks, truth claims leave their
secluded sanctuaries as their technologised results spill out into the wild world, and new
A

groups and identities use every option to challenge expertise where it affects their own lives,
to generate new forms of collaborative learning. In these novel challenges to scientific
authority, all the conventional divisions between science and technology, between truth and
utility, are deemed archaic, as are divisions between fact and value, truth and power, experts
and lay persons – all those dichotomies that have structured our thought for so long. From
this perspective, science – the body of truth claims generated by research in laboratory
setups, normed and sanctioned by the apparatus of peer reviews, journal publications and
the like – is deemed radically incapable of specifying the kinds of real-world consequences
that its escape into technology might generate. If it is valid at all, this is only in its own
secluded haunts; those experts who seek to suggest otherwise are merely enacting a certain
kind of politics by other means. I wonder if this would be the conclusion that Fleck would
have hoped for from the tsunami of critique that has engulfed science from the discipline of
science and technology studies that his historical epistemology prefigured. I doubt it.

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 Rose

For me, a more radical challenge is to go beyond the mode of ‘critique’ of scientific
knowledge and all those seeming radical gestures associated with it, and to be able, once
more, to link theoretical endeavours with normative claims. It is no easy matter to make
things true in the experimental sciences; the aim of criticism would be to put those truths in
the service of democracy, not to make democracy in some way the arbiter of truth. I use the
term ‘truth’ here quite deliberately, though I know it is unfashionable, for it is indeed truth –
or what is to count as truth – that is at stake here. A previous generation of critics focussed
on falsity, the critique of ideology, of the falsehoods spread in the service of sectional
interests. In so doing, they left implicit the question of the truth status that would remain if
and when those falsehoods with a function could be eliminated. But for me, a focus on truth
is necessary to retain a normative dimension to criticism. Of course, we can write the
genealogy of truths, analyse the conditions for creation of truth, the criteria for adjudication
of truth claims and the authorisation of those able to speak the truth. These have a history,
but it is our history too. We must make use of the most rigorous mechanisms for evaluating

PY
truth that are available to us, in our own time and place, if we are to have a ground on which
to stand in critical debates over the direction and consequences of scientific research and
technological development. The aim of criticism, here, would be to help make truths more
robust, not less so – to engage in the difficult work of ‘unlocking’ the contesting stakeholders

O
– both the scientists and their critics – from their respective thought collectives. That might
be the start of building the alliances with researchers, with experts, with funders, even
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with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, to sustain truth claims, and to develop
their implications so that scientific and technological developments might serve such
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old-fashioned values as social progress and global public goods. The aim of arguments for
democracy in science would be less to critique science, than to foster the debate about the
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forms of life we wish to lead, about what kinds of innovations in the human and non-human
world, controlled by whom, might be desirable, acceptable or problematic. It would be to
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constantly insist on an injunction on all parties to take up the impossible, but indispensible
disposition of responsibility towards the futures they are helping bring into existence.
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Acknowledgements
A

Thanks to Claire Marris for allowing me to draw on our joint paper on ‘Open Engagement’
referenced below. I also thank Des Fitzgerald and Joy Zhang for helpful comments on an
earlier version, and the organisers and participants in the conference – especially Michael
Hagner – for their comments. The usual caveats apply.

About the Author

Nikolas Rose is Professor of Sociology and Head of the Department of Social Science,
Health and Medicine at King’s College, London. He was previously Martin White Professor
of Sociology, and Director of the BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine,
Biotechnology and Society at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is
also co-PI for the EPSRC funded Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation (CSynBI).

12 r 2012 The London School of Economics and Political Science 1745-8552 BioSocieties 1–14
 Democracy in the contemporary life sciences

His most recent books are The Politics of Life Itself : Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity
in the Twenty-first Century (Princeton, 2006); Governing the Present (with Peter Miller,
Polity, 2008) and Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind
(with Joelle Abi-Rached, Princeton, forthcoming, 2012). He is a longstanding member of
the Editorial Board of Economy and Society, co-editor of BioSocieties: an interdisciplinary
journal for social studies of the life sciences, Chair of the European Neuroscience and
Society Network, and a member of numerous advisory groups including the Nuffield
Council on Bioethics.

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