Big Science

This Impact Report identifies and summarises the diverse impacts, resulting from the £500m of UK funding of Science and Technology in 2013, using numerous quantitative metrics and short case study extracts.  It shows how the varied impacts of a national science and technology organization and its many funded programmes can be annually identified, captured, tracked, and summarised in a public document.

The report was produced for, and by, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) -  the UK Research Council responsible for funding: (1) all UK astronomy, particle and nuclear physics research, (2) related UK science and technology facilities (e.g. as Harwell and Daresbury), (3) the UK contribution to international science (e.g. CERN, international telescopes and space missions), (4) innovation and business spin-off programmes, and (5) UK public engagement activities.

The Report was co-researched and co-authored by the STFC Impact Team, including myself while Impact Evaluation Manager in 2013, with Dr. Claire Dougan-McCallie (lead author/Head of Impact) and Jenny Beard, with additional input from senior managers, and many data and case study contributions from other key managers across STFC.

Varied key impacts are identified and reported including:

• Research amongst the best (by citation impact) in astronomy, nuclear and particle physics.
• Supported research of 226 Principal Investigators in 70 universities, led to 1,100 peer-reviewed papers in 2012.
• Facilities (the Diamond Light Source, ISIS and CLF) were used in 2012/13 by over 4,200 unique users , in over 2,400 experiments, producing over 1,000 papers in peer-reviewed journals.

• Technology from CERN benefited the UK economy by over £100 billion every year.
• Funding the development of the UK’s space, internet and computer animation industries, returned over £500 billion to the UK economy per annum.
• Funded Innovation Campuses hosted over 230 enterprises and supported over 5,000 jobs.
• UK industry won £43 million in contracts from the international subscriptions funded, and had accumulated a total of £150 million since 2005.

• Funded research inspired future generations to study STEM subjects, attracting 90% of UK undergraduates to study physics, funded 782 PhD students  and 16,800 student training days.
• Between 2009 to 2012 public engagement programmes engaged people on 58 million occasions, with 2 million people engaged in face-to-face activities in 2013 alone.

Is biology the most recent member of the big science family? The increase of collaboration in biology research certainly became subject of heated debates in the wake of the Human Genome Project. However, debates and reflections remained largely mired in polemics and a limited appreciation of the diversity and explanatory power of the concept of big science. At the same time, scholars of science and technology have largely eschewed use of the term in their attempts to understand transformations in the current research landscape. This paper combines a conceptual analysis of the concept of big science, with different data and ideas from a multi-method investigation of several large-scale research projects in biology to move past normative debates, simplistic dichotomies and rhetorical positions to develop an empirically grounded, nuanced and analytically useful understanding of big biology. While the concept of big science can be seen as a fashion in science policy -and perhaps an old-fashioned one by now- I will argue that its analytic use importantly directs attention to increasing collaboration in the biosciences. Analysing big biology, and distinguishing it from big physics and other forms of big science, shows differences in patterns of its research organisation, technologies and the societal contexts in which it operates. As such, reflections on big science, big biology, and their relation to knowledge production can place recent claims about fundamental transformations in life science research into a historical context.

Mamy dostatecznie dużą wiedzę, aby wskazać plusy i minusy projektyzacji uniwersytetu. Określenie tożsamości nauki, tak aby była ona integralną częścią rozumienia i poznania nas samych i świata, wydaje mi się dziś nie tylko niezmiernie istotne, ale i konieczne

One interesting aspect of the Hwang-case has been the way in which this affair was assessed by academic journals such as Nature. Initially, Hwang’s success was regarded as evidence for the detrimental effects of research ethics, slowing down the pace of research in Western countries. Eventually, however, Hwang’s debacle was seen as evidence for the importance of ethics in the life sciences. Ironically, it was concluded that the West maintains its prominence in science (as a global endeavour) precisely because it has its ethics in place. Bioethics was now seen as an indispensable part of quality control. In this article, I will claim that the Hwang case rather reveals that there is no reason for complacency and that there are substantial challenges awaiting us. They have to do with major transformations in the way knowledge is produced and research in the life sciences is conducted (such as the increase in pace and scale, globalisation and the growing importance of ICT and bioinformation). These transformations call for a different kind of bioethics. The focus must shift from duties of autonomous researchers concerning visible research subjects (“micro-ethics”) to responsibilities of institutionalised research networks in managing and processing large amounts of bioinformation (“macro-ethics”). Concepts such as transparency, reliability and benefit-sharing will become more important than concepts such as informed consent. Basically, it is a resurgence of the tension between the Kantian and the Hegelian view of ethics. The contours of macro-ethics will be elaborated notably as it is emerging in bioethical debates over biobanking and genetic databanks.

The Human Genome Project (HGP) is regarded by many as one of the major scientific achievements in recent science history, a large-scale endeavour that is changing the way in which biomedical research is done and expected, moreover, to yield considerable benefit for society. Thus, since the completion of the human genome sequencing effort, a debate has emerged over the question whether this effort merits to be awarded a Nobel Prize and if so, who should be the one(s) to receive it, as (according to current procedures) no more than three individuals can be selected. In this article, the HGP is taken as a case study to consider the ethical question to what extent it is still possible, in an era of big science, of large-scale consortia and global team work, to acknowledge and reward individual contributions to important breakthroughs in biomedical fields. Is it still viable to single out individuals for their decisive contributions in order to reward them in a fair and convincing way? Whereas the concept of the Nobel prize as such seems to reflect an archetypical view of scientists as solitary researchers who, at a certain point in their careers, make their one decisive discovery, this vision has proven to be problematic from the very outset. Already during the first decade of the Nobel era, Ivan Pavlov was denied the Prize several times before finally receiving it, on the basis of the argument that he had been active as a research manager (a designer and supervisor of research projects) rather than as a researcher himself. The question then is whether, in the case of the HGP, a research effort that involved the contributions of hundreds or even thousands of researchers worldwide, it is still possible to “individualise” the Prize? The “HGP Nobel Prize problem” is regarded as an exemplary issue in current research ethics, highlighting a number of quandaries and trends involved in contemporary life science research practices more broadly.

This study focuses on the 5-year Protein 3000 Project launched in 2002, the largest biological
project in Japan. The project aimed to overcome Japan’s alleged failure to contribute fully to
the Human Genome Project, by determining 3000 protein structures, 30 percent of the global
target. Despite its achievement of this goal, the project was fiercely criticized in various sectors of
society and was often branded an awkward failure. This article tries to solve the mystery of why
such failure discourse was prevalent. Three explanatory factors are offered: first, because some
goals were excluded during project development, there was a dynamic of failed expectations;
second, structural genomics, while promoting collaboration with the international community,
became an ‘anti-boundary object’, only the absence of which bound heterogeneous domestic
actors; third, there developed an urgent sense of international competition in order to obtain
patents on such structural information.

We apply the concept of invisible labor, as developed by labor scholars over the last forty years, to data-intensive science. Drawing on a fifteen-year corpus of research into multiple domains of data-intensive science, we use a series of ethnographic vignettes to offer a snapshot of the varieties and valences of labor in data-intensive science. We conceptualize data-intensive science as an evolving field and set of practices and highlight parallels between the labor literature and Science and Technology Studies. Further, we note where data-intensive science intersects and overlaps with broader trends in the 21st century economy. In closing, we argue for further research that takes scientific work and labor as its starting point.

What options are open for people—citizens, politicians, and other nonscientists—to become actively involved in and anticipate new directions in the life sciences? In addressing this question , this article focuses on the start of the Human Genome Project (1985-1990). By contrasting various models of democracy (liberal, republican, deliberative), I examine the democratic potential the models provide for citizens' involvement in setting priorities and funding patterns related to big science projects. To enhance the democratizing of big science projects and give citizens opportunities to reflect, anticipate, and negotiate on new directions in science and technology at a global level, liberal democracy with its national scope and representative structure does not suffice. Although republican (communicative) and deliberative (associative) democracy models meet the need for greater citizen involvement, the ways to achieve the ideal at a global level still remain to be developed.

Compétition ou coopération? Fonds publics ou investissements privés? Libre circulation ou secret de la connaissance? Ces questions qui sont au coeur des grands programmes de recherche de nos jours, agitait déjà l'Europe lorsqu'elle lançait d'ambitieuses expéditions maritimes à la découverte du Pacifique au XVIIIe siècle

For decades, the big science and little science dichotomy has served as a starting point for many analyses of scientific research and data practices, including studies used to inform the construction of scientific knowledge infrastructures. We challenge this dichotomy by presenting findings from longitudinal, qualitative case studies of data life cycles in two scientific domains, each centered around a large, distributed scientific collaboration. One is astronomy and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The other is the deep subseafloor biosphere and the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations (C-DEBI). We show that some critical stages of the data life cycle in each domain unfold in big science contexts while other critical stages occur in little science contexts. Furthermore, these big and little science contexts shape each other dynamically. This challenging of the big and little science dichotomy has implications for the building of scientific knowledge infrastructures, including those supporting data management.

Many observers have assumed that the American Human Brain Project of the 1990s marked the culmination of the “computer revolution” in neuroscience. The Project aimed to build a large-scale brain database and drew an international participation from countries including South Korea. The development of the Human Brain Project was, however, not a sudden or inevitable consequence of the adoption of new computing technologies in neuroscience. It rather represented the contingent gathering of divergent moral economies which shaped the values of data and data practices in neuroscience in different countries. From a historical and comparative perspective, my book project examines distinctive evolutionary processes of the “computer revolution” in the U.S. and South Korea and its culmination in the Human Brain Project in the post-Cold War period. By doing so, it traces the conjoint rise of big data and big biology at the interdisciplinary intersection of brain, mind, and computer studies in the late 20th century.

This talk presents an overview of my book in progress, mainly focusing on the U.S. It will highlight two moments in the history of neuroscience, when its plural term, neurosciences, was highly used and resonated to address the issue of heterogeneous ideas and practices in brain science. The first moment was when the first neuroscience community was formed at MIT in the 1960s with the launch of the “Neurosciences Research Program.” The second moment was when the “Neurosciences Research Branch” was newly built at the National Institute of Mental Health in the 1980s which led the Human Brain Project in the U.S. By focusing on those two moments, this talk will show the changing meaning of computing technologies, the shaping of interdisciplinarity in neuroscience(s), and the making of big science project during and after the Cold War.

This presentation revisits the history of neuroscience in the late 20th century through the lens of big science.

In 1962, the field of neuroscience, known as the modern brain study, was launched in the U.S., with the establishment of the Neurosciences Research Program (NRP). Led by Francis O. Schmitt, a well-known biologist at the MIT, the NRP has been regarded as the symbol of the triumph of molecularization in brain studies in the 20th century. However, this presentation reveals how Schmitt hoped to move beyond molecular approaches to develop a big theory in brain studies akin to quantum theory in physics. By unveiling Schmitt's notes, interactions with cyberneticians including Norbert Wiener, and his writings as a religious person as well as a scientist, it re-examines the beginning of modern brain study in the U.S. and shows why the plural term "neurosciences" was coined instead of use of the singular "neuroscience" in the 1960s.

In addition, this presentation analyzes how the idea of developing a big theory in brain studies gave way to the emphasis on gathering and managing big data from the late 1970s. When the National Institute of Mental Health pushed ahead a new Neurosciences Research Program with the establishment of Neurosciences Research Branch in the 1980s, it had the same name to the NRP, named in the 1960s, but the meaning of 's' in neurosciences was different. Based on the analysis of the formation and evolution of the NRB in the NIMH in the 1980s, this presentation ultimately compares the two different ideas of neurosciences developed in the late 20th century and sheds light on comparative senses of the Cold-War and the post-Cold War research programs in the U.S.

Nikolas Rose and Joelle M. Abi-Rached have argued that the modern neuroscience in the United States appeared in the 1960s with the establishment of the Neuroscience Research Program by Francis O. Schmitt (1903-1955). As the epistemological basis of the new field, they highlighted the emergence of a new way of seeing the brain, the neuromolecular gaze. This paper aims to argue against their claim on the birth of the neuromolecular gaze by analyzing Francis O. Schmitt's various aspects as a scientist as well as a theologian. By showing how various perspectives Schmitt had on the brain, this paper demonstrates that what makes the modern field of neuroscience was not the epistemological shift toward the neuromolecular gaze, but rather the coexistence of various epistemologies. In addition, this paper introduces a similar way of thinking about the brain appeared in South Korea based on an examination of Chung Ho-Sun who contributed to passing the Brain Research Promotion Act in the late 1990s. By comparing the similarities and differences between Francis O. Schmitt and Chung Ho-Sun, this paper reconsiders the nature of the modern field of neuroscience and how historians have to write about the history of neuroscience.

This recently published book consists of three major parts on the various aspects of the practice of contemporary science and technology with reference to a variety of life sciences such as antibiotics research, chemical biology, natural products chemistry, structural biology and genomics and such data bases as chemical compounds as knowledge infrastructure. 
    The introduction discusses the outline of the development from laboratory studies to the wider issues involving both science policy and innovation practices.

    Part one deals with the microscopic aspects within laboratory practices, consisting of three chapters:
Chapter one, Research path analysis: on the micro-dynamics of research strategy. Chapter two, Laboratory as organization: the dynamism of meaning and coordination. Chapter three, The myth and reality of knowledge transfer: an interactive model of expertise in laboratory practices.

  Part two discusses the interface between laboratory practices with the wider social issues such as science policy and public data base construction:
Chapter four  is Resilience in scientific research;
Chapter five, Between laboratory and policy process;
Chapter six, Constructing failure in big biology,
Chapter seven, Value oscillation in knowledge infrastructure.

  Part three deals with more general issues related to contemporary scientific practices:
Chapter eight, Scientific misconduct as an organizational index of its healthiness;
Chapter nine,  Network of causation, related to the issue of understanding causation in a highly complex system;
Chapter ten,  Blade runner and memory devices;
Chapter eleven Between scientific and everyday experiment.

The last additional chapter is a linkage with my previous book, Ecology of Learning, with the title of Domesticating risk: emergency medicine viewed as the apparatus for crisis management.

Precipitated by advancing technology, the globally networked information society appears to be either clarifying or redefining what authorship means across fields of inquiry. The recent massive shift toward multiple authorship in the scientific literature, coupled with high-profile cases of abuse, has occasioned considerable effort to codify and standardize authorship norms in scientific journals, which has culminated in a high-level movement to completely redefine the concept of authorship for both empirical and theoretical research. Since it also goes without saying that the very concept of the author’s autonomy and authority has been under increasing scrutiny since the advent of poststructuralist philosophy, the current state of affairs thus provides an excellent opportunity for an interdisciplinary examination of the contributions of agents such as translators and revisers

Le ricerche sull'universo, sui suoi misteri, sulle sue certezze, fin da sempre hanno interessato l'uomo che in qualche modo sentiva l'esigenza di trovare delle risposte oltre il mondo terreno, immergendosi tra le stelle. Dapprima, la certezza che il cielo mantenesse quella perfezione inviolabile ed immutabile, come una sfera di cristallo, dura, impenetrabile, un dipinto divino da osservare con ammirazione, sede della creazione convergente nel punto focale prospettico che per secoli è stato la Terra. Successivamente lo sconvolgimento copernicano a sradicare la teoria geocentrica ponendo il Sole come fuoco centrale attorno al quale i pianeti ruoterebbero. Per giungere poi al coraggio premuroso di Galileo Galilei che, affascinato dalla matematica, proietta le formule aritmetiche al cosmo cogliendone la sua profonda complessità. Scoperte, quelle galileiane, oltre il mondo delle apparenze, contro il senso comune ed il pensiero corrente, che avrebbero fatto vibrare le certezze fin d'ora esistenti come vibrano le stelle. La modernità e attualità di Galileo appartengono ad un tempo senza età. Se i suoi studi portano alla rottura radicale con la religione segnando la modernità, aprono anche ad una riflessione morale sull'uomo, il suo ruolo e la sua posizione all'interno del cosmo. Di riflesso all'universo esso vede la profondità dell'esistenza umana. Galileo si discosta dal pensiero comune, da quell'antropocentrismo che poneva l'uomo al centro come essere più importante in quanto creato ad immagine e somiglianza del trascendente divino, governatore della natura e del cosmo intero. Per Galileo la natura non ha a che fare con nulla di sovrannaturale; essa procede per inerzia secondo le proprie leggi, esiste da sempre, prima che l'uomo potesse avere le capacità e le tecniche per comprenderla. Se a Galileo si accusa il distacco dell'uomo dalla natura, per la matematizzazione del cosmo, probabilmente non si ha occhi abbastanza poetici per osservare il cielo. Gli studi galileiani non solo forniscono una spiegazione del "come" dei fenomeni cosmici utilizzando la matematica, ma permettono di far si che l'uomo si possa sentire veramente parte dell'intero universo. Per questo motivo la grande sfida da parte di Galileo è quella di riunire l'astrattezza dell'idealità matematica con la concretezza e la realtà del fenomeno con tutte le sue particolarità. Galileo non vuole assolutamente escludere l'uomo dalle sue ricerche, semplicemente pensa che si possa capire l'esistenza umana da un altro punto di vista, quello cosmico. Galileo punta il telescopio verso il cielo allungando l'orizzonte all'infinito, sfida i pregiudizi sulla natura, dialoga con essa e attraverso le sensate esperienze e le matematiche dimostrazioni ricerca il vero. Presunzione? Arroganza? Eroico furore? No. Esso naviga semplicemente all'interno della sua passione e con una nuova filosofia, basata sui fatti, dipinge diversamente la verità della natura. Galileo e la natura si comprendono grazie alla stessa lingua,

The work of a contemporary physicist is shaped and dominated by contingency of experimental constraints and on a more fundamental level on the constitution of nature. The encounter with contingency begins in the first lectures on mechanics where the students learn about measurement error and deviation. It later continues in experimental practice with the seemingly endless miniscule steps of creating plots and histograms out of experimentally collected data, rewriting codes of non-linear algorithms to train the data and choosing between several stochastic Monte Carlo generators in order to analyze the „contingent“ to detect truth. The events of data are happening in a space of experimental possibility, which changes its horizon through perspective and approach. Over binning and re-binning, smoothing and symmetrizing the inputs, blinding and unblinding data, checking and crosschecking the outcomes, to the last interpretative research steps that lead to either a published result or the published lack thereof, the work of physics is shaped and dominated by fluctuations of contingent choices and variables. Because high-energy physicists work in teams of researchers from all over the world, perhaps united in their mathematical knowledge but divided in languages and cultures, even intra-group communication is marked by errors in understanding and shows how scientific cosmology is always shaped by contingency.

Every experimentally gathered data entails uncertainty and constraints, and incorporates serendipity and randomness. In fact, every measurement in physics leads to uncertainty and is accompanied by a calculation of a standard deviation, which is represented by the Greek letter s (Sigma). In quantum mechanics, this uncertainty is even doubled through the impossibility to know for certain position and momentum of a particle. Here, every calculation is just an approximation to certainty. Contingency is the essence of scientific truth. Without acknowledging this, science would become a dogmatic religion and lose its foremost quality to question itself, although it paradoxically searches to avoid erring while seeking truth.

In my paper I want to present first research results of my current ethnographic study, where I aim to systematically compare work practices and modes of thinking within two scientific collaborations using particle detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the CERN: the ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) and the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid)

According to Hegel, the basic assignment of philosophy is to capture the present in thoughts. When it comes to understanding our present, an assessment of the technosciences and their impact on our view on nature, society and ourselves must be of key importance. A prominent feature of contemporary technosciences resides in their pervasiveness: the extent to which they pervade nature, society and human bodies, even on a molecular level, as well as each other. On the one hand, the 20th century is the era of the elementary particles, of identifying the elementary subatomic and molecular building blocks of matter and life. On the other hand, it is the era of complexity, of evolving systems. In both directions, our understanding of ourselves is challenged and deepened by technoscientific explorations. Increasingly, moreover, our technologies tend become nature-like. This allows us to embed them more adequately in natural systems, but it also opens up unprecedented opportunities for modifying natural systems, including human bodies. How are we to address the bioethical and biopolitical prospects and concerns implied in these developments?