Behind Our Work: A Q&A with Brooke Smith

As The Kavli Foundation announces its new grantees in Ethics, Science, and the Public, Science and Society Director Brooke Smith sat down to discuss the genesis of this initiative, why it’s needed, and what she hopes people will learn from it. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What sparked The Kavli Foundation's interest in Ethics, Science, and the Public?

The foundation's mission is science to benefit humanity. We focus on achieving that mission through investing in curiosity-driven work in the fields of nanoscience, neuroscience, and astrophysics. In addition to strategic grantmaking in these fields, we have a long-term commitment to 20 different Kavli Institutes around the world.

We are investing in a lot of cutting-edge science, and in these fields, the ability to make scientific discoveries is happening at an accelerated rate. When we have a better understanding of ourselves, of the universe, or of how things work, there are so many possibilities of how we can use that knowledge. There may also be concerns or less-than-positive implications of science, or the science might hold benefits for some people and consequences for others.

There was a watershed moment for us about six years ago. A scientist at the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience at Yale University, Nenad Sestan, restored circulation and cellular function to a dead pig brain. His work diffused into the public consciousness. Nenad sought out partnerships with ethicists, other scientists, and funders to think about what this might mean. When we at the foundation read The New York Times Magazine’s cover story “Scientists Are Giving Dead Brains New Life. What Could Go Wrong?”, we discussed how truly groundbreaking this work was and just how many questions it prompted—questions that should be raised and discussed by experts beyond just scientists. As it all unfolded, it invited the question of how prepared other scientists who find themselves in similar situations are to think about what their research's implications might be.

So you are supporting scientists who want to examine those considerations? What about humanities scholars, experts in science engagement, or community organizations?

Yes, we look to support scientists, especially as our primary constituency at the foundation – empowering them to be prepared to navigate these issues; particularly so they do not need to do so alone. We look to fund the confluence of all those experts. We see a lack of truly reciprocal collaborations between scientists, social scientists, ethicists, philosophers, ethnographers, science and technology study scholars, and experts who know how to engage with communities, who may not have an academic affiliation.

We think there's value in that nexus. But to be clear, we don't think this approach is the silver bullet. It is one piece of broader work to engage society on science's ethical implications.

You've funded two Kavli Centers to explore this nexus. What is distinct about these centers compared to related efforts in science and ethics around the world?

The Kavli Centre for Ethics, Science, and the Public at University of Cambridge is bringing communities, scientists, social scientists, and ethicists together to explore possible futures as they relate to cutting edge basic science, for example related to artificial intelligence (AI) and gene editing. They're taking innovative new approaches that leverage the best scholarship about public engagement, and are leading new scholarship as they learn. They're bringing that to bear on earlier-stage science than has been done before.

The Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public at the University of California, Berkeley is working to empower the next generation of scientists to be prepared when there are potential ethical challenges in their research. They're equipping scientists who identify as basic researchers to identify collaborators with expertise outside of their scientific training. Their flagship program is a fellowship for graduate students and postdocs from humanities and sciences, through which they learn about each other's disciplines and consider what collaborations could look like, while continuing to work at the bench. There aren't many opportunities for early-career researchers to do this, especially in the context of fundamental research.

What do we know about the history of scientists engaging communities about ethical considerations, or about what's happening currently?

We commissioned the Danish Board of Technology, now part of a Denmark-based organization called DEMOCRACY X, to help us understand this space. This group enables community members to have a voice in policymaking around issues of emerging science and technology. We asked them to look at interactions between ethics, public engagement, and various fields of science. We wanted to get a sense of where touch points show up in the cycle of discovery. One of the take-homes of their report is that communities tend to engage when something is already controversial, when the science turns into a product, or when people can imagine very specifically what those products are.

What do experts think about that timing?

I'll point to a number of consensus studies published by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. These reports are typically done when a field has enough traction for the Academies to assemble leaders in the discipline to examine the field's current state and lay out future scenarios, research agendas, and potential policy implications. Multiple consensus studies contain a call to engage public audiences sooner than has been done, to get their thoughts about these fields that could have huge implications for society. The reports cover topics as diverse as human neural organoids (tiny models of brains in a dish that contain genetic information) and human-AI teaming.

That is rarely done. The recommendation is made and then it sits in a report on a shelf. It's not clear whose responsibility it is to engage. Nor is it work that is typically funded.

Even when researchers and communicators do talk to members of society about what they think of emerging research, those insights rarely reach the greater scientific community. Researchers aren't becoming aware of what communities' issues or ideas are, and whether that can influence the directions of their science. Social scientist Dietram Scheufele at the University of Wisconsin–Madison calls this "closing the loop" in a 2021 publication in the Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences. A number of other scholars have also written opinion pieces and white papers about this gap more generally. It's a gap we wanted to address.

If the gap were to be filled, what do you think the outcome would be?

We often hear that if we better understood what the public thought about the ethical implications of research, our science would be better. But we don't know what better means. Is that true? “Better” in what way?

We're trying to seed a few projects to close that loop and see what happens, rather than prescribe a specific outcome.

Can you provide an example of a new insight that's emerged from this work?

We've seen that sometimes the scientific community might think that the public has a certain view, but they shouldn't make those assumptions without talking to the relevant communities.

Inspired by a National Academies consensus study, calling for public engagement to explore organoid research, we provided support to the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University to address this gap. This funding supported the hiring of neuroscientist Lomax Boyd to address this as a as Civic Science Fellow,. The Civic Science Fellows Program is supported by multiple foundations, including The Kavli Foundation. The program empowers emerging leaders to work at the intersection of science and society. Lomax’s work, and that of other scholars that he curated, showed us that the public wasn't particularly concerned with what scientists thought they'd care about—emerging consciousness in disembodied tissue. Instead, they were much more concerned about crossing a divide between humans and animals in experiments that, for example, created something from multiple species' cells.

That painted a picture for us of why it's important to have conversations with members of the public. People who might be affected by a field of science may differ demographically from scientists or have a different set of values and assumptions. Researchers should have conversations with these people, or partner with those who can, and then truly listen to what they have to say.

Let's circle back to experts' calls to engage the public sooner on ethical implications of research. When is "sooner"?

We get this question a lot. This is one of the hardest questions. I don’t think we know...yet. If it's too early, then scientists don't know what the implications of their work might be. It can be too early for members of society to see it as a priority or relevant to their lives.

The process of discovery often doesn't have that aha moment that leads a researcher to think, "oh my gosh, now we need to collaborate with an ethicist." It's iterative; it's cyclical. And so how to build in conversations about ethical implications in a way that works for how science is done is a major question. Some of the projects we've chosen to fund are intended to help shed light on this.

What other research are you supporting to understand the landscape of ethics, science, and the public?

We're supporting the University of Michigan’s Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program to do a landscape assessment and comparative case study analysis to better understand who already provides training for scientists to better connect with communities and policy opportunities. We want to know how the training is structured, what kinds of gaps and opportunities there might be, and how the most effective approaches might be scaled.

We're also supporting the Science, Media, and the Public (SCIMEP) Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They're looking at what's been published in peer-reviewed literature about public opinion about basic science—specifically fields like gene editing and AI. Then they're going to review what researchers are studying about public opinion academically. They want to gain some perspective about whether or not the academics are asking and studying relevant questions about public opinion. And then, if they are, are they closing the loop by sharing their results with the scientific community? Those results are most often published in social science literature, which many physical and biological scientists aren't accessing.

We don't have results from this work yet but we're excited to see what they find.

You're also funding Civic Science Fellows exploring the ethics of emerging research areas. What might their work uncover?

We already talked about Lomax Boyd's insights. There's also Christine Custis, a computer scientist at the Institute for Advanced Study working with Alondra Nelson, who leads the Institute’s Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab. Custis’s work looks at AI both at the level of discovery and application. She isbe interrogating the question of timing of ethics discussions in basic versus applied work, and what that might mean for engagement. And there's also Narayan Sankaran, a cognitive neuroscientist and neuroethicist and fellow at the Berkeley Kavli Center, and now faculty at University of San Francisco. He's looking at the developing science of neurotechnology and brain-machine interfaces and what that means for engaging the public.

How did all these projects culminate in the 2024 workshop the foundation convened about ethics, science, and the public? What were the workshop's goals and its takeaways?

Now that we had funded the centers and the other work we've discussed, we knew that we wanted to fund additional projects in this space. To determine where best to direct funding, we wanted to understand what the obstacles there were to creating multidisciplinary ethics-centered collaborations. We also wanted to know what the opportunities were, and what kinds of resources might be helpful.

We convened a group of about 35 scientists, ethicists and civic engagement experts to ask these questions. We ended up with three big takeaways.

First, scientists making discoveries are often not part of conversations about ethical considerations. They don't have to be, but those who want to should be, and should have a mechanism to do so.

Second, the question of timing—when is the right time to build collaborations to engage the public about ethics—is tricky.

Third, there's a lack of incentives to work across disciplinary boundaries and to do public engagement.

How did those takeaways influence what you looked for in your 2024 call for proposals?

We wanted to find ways to address those three big things. We also acknowledged that The Kavli Foundation is already funding so much great basic science.

So we made a decision to open a proposal invitation to all the remarkable scientists we're already connected to, "Are any of you working on anything that might have ethical implications for society? If so, would you like to apply for funding to advance that thinking?" We looked for proposals with meaningful participation of Kavli-funded scientists, multidisciplinary collaboration including public groups, and a mechanism to inform the scientific community about what they learn.

How was the response to the call?

We were inspired by how many scientists contacted us about the call for proposals. It showed us that people are really thinking about ethical implications of science, but they don't know where to go to fund this work or even to do it.

When I saw that excitement, I was reminded that Berkeley's Jennifer Doudna, who won a Kavli Prize as well as a Nobel Prize for co-discovering the gene editing technique CRISPR, has written that it would have been immensely helpful to have had a central resource to navigate ethical implications of her work.

We also saw so much creativity in proposals about how to do multidisciplinary collaborations. Supporting that in ways that are grounded in scholarship and best practices is going to be important moving forward.

You mentioned the foundation's focus on basic science. What, if any, special considerations are there for researchers doing curiosity-driven work to take part in conversations about ethical implications?

I'll draw a parallel with something we learned from the foundation's Science Public Engagement Partnership (SciPEP) with the Department of Energy Office of Science. Basic scientists can often need more help than applied researchers in defining their goals for engagement with public audiences. I think we're likely to see that basic scientists also differ from applied researchers in how they approach engaging society on ethical issues. It’s simply harder to wrap your ahead how to have these conversations when not applied science or already a piece of tech in someone’s lives. That in turn could necessitate more support or different support.

What do you want to say to researchers who are interested in this work, but didn't submit any ideas?

Having conversations with folks who are exploring this territory, or are in other disciplines you might collaborate with, is a great start. We heard from folks at the Berkeley Kavli Center that even coffee hours for philosophers and scientists to casually chat about what they are working on has been impactful. Even if you don't have a quarter million dollars to do a project, you can start conversations and build relationships.

What would you say to other funding organizations that invest in basic science?

Multidisciplinary collaboration and engagement costs money. We can't expect that it's going to happen as part of someone’s job, or in an unfunded way. Consider helping bridge that gap to get from scientific discovery to the social discussions. Without that bridge, those discussions are going to happen later, maybe too late. We're happy to share what we're learning. We hope to see other funders engaged so that more of this work can be supported.

What milestones can we expect in the years to come?

Within the first year, I think we'll learn a lot about what it takes to set up these collaborations. In two to five years, I think we'll have a sense of the impact of this work on science or on the members of the public who are participating in the projects. I also think we're going to see an impact on scientists. What research questions do they ask as a result of having engaged the public? Where do graduate students and postdocs involved with this work go in their careers?

What are you planning next?

Between the centers, the work we've already funded, and now these new projects, I'm just really, really excited to see what we can learn.