Ethics, the Public, and the Early-Career Researcher

Not every early-career scientific researcher has a single-minded dedication to the lab bench. It’s possible to conjure a different sort of scientist in the mind’s eye. They focus on fundamental research to further society’s knowledge, not necessarily aiming for an application—perhaps neuroscience or nanoscience. They might be refining research questions or getting preliminary data. They’re figuring out their lab’s capacity and applying for grants to fund more work. At some point, this researcher might think about what the press, the public, or ethicists will have to say as the research process unfolds. They may realize they lack capabilities to fully explore ethical implications, or to understand public views, of their research and consider them when designing follow-up work.

And then they might get stuck. They’re not sure what kinds of collaborators they need. They might have vague ideas about wanting to involve people whose lives will be impacted by their research, or about bouncing things off of an ethicist. But they lack experience or role models for building ties across fields. “It’s like, ‘I want to do this, but I don’t know where to start’,” says Emily Costa, a civic science associate at RockEDU Science Outreach at The Rockefeller University.

As the months turn into years, even if they do find support in exploring ethical facets of science, they may come to the conclusion that to be supported in that work long-term, they should pursue careers in science communication or science policy, rather than a tenure-track job in a university science department. It’s important to have science-trained policy experts and communicators,

says Lea Witkowsky, Executive Director of the Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public at the University of California, Berkeley. "But if we want to change how science is done and how scientists participate in thinking about the implications of their work, we can't just funnel scientists who are interested in these topics away from science,” she says.

Costa and Witkowsky are each co-directing a different new grant from The Kavli Foundation that will help aspiring boundary-spanning basic scientists. With the systematic peer guidance that the pair of grants aims to establish, these researchers might better navigate the challenges of exploring ethics and engagement alongside bench work, and perhaps someday, transform what a job in scientific research looks like.

One grant will fund a collection of case studies, each narrating how a researcher is cobbling together support to explore ethical by-products of their research and engage public audiences in ethics discussions. Case studies will cover what sparked researchers’ interest in this multidisciplinary work, challenges encountered, lessons learned, and more.

The other grant will explore the possibility of a network of scientists who are trying to engage with ethics and society while running their labs. It will stimulate connections between these multidisciplinary researchers and potential employers, funders, and policy experts. The goal is for employers and funders to discuss how they view such boundary-spanning work and describe what would be needed to incentivize hiring this special sort of scientist.

Scientists and Societal Context – the Case Studies

Costa, at Rockefeller, is a co-principal investigator on the case study grant. But she won’t be writing the case studies. A dozen early-career scientists will create the resource with help from The Communicating Science workshop for graduate students (ComSciCon), where Costa is on the leadership team.

ComSciCon is a go-to organization for early-career researchers seeking to communicate with clarity and relevance. Plans are in motion to recruit case study writers and scientists to be profiled, leveraging ComSciCon’s alumni network and early-career researchers at Kavli Institutes.

To help writers build interviewing and wordsmithing skills for creating case studies, Costa and her ComSciCon colleagues Harshil Kamdar, Meredith Schmehl, and Nathan Sanders will leverage virtual programming and the in-person Create-a-Thon, a writer’s circle on steroids that occurs during ComSciCon’s annual flagship workshop. Every year, Create-a-Thon attendees develop essays, comics, and more for science communication.

Energy at a Create-a-Thon is palpable. It’s a buoyant, supportive event. Scientists who might have felt isolated at their home institution for being interested in communication suddenly find themselves crowding around small tables with like-minded peers to finalize a round of edits or critique a podcast, Costa says. “There’s chatter over here and laughter over there. And it’s busy, but it’s thoughtful.” Incorporating a focus on early career scientists telling stories about how they considered ethical implications of their research will elucidate more practical examples of what it looks like for scientists to incorporate societal perspectives into their research and work.

The effort is already bearing fruit. Nominees for people to profile in case studies are rolling in, as are eager writers. Soon, ComSciCon will recruit mentors for writers from the ethics, civic science, and public engagement spheres.

“In the absence of tailored grants like what The Kavli Foundation is offering, there’s not much incentive for this sort of public engagement to take place in basic science research,” Costa says.

Given the amount of enthusiasm at the outset, Costa hopes that the training, peer support, and resources the project will provide can sustain this new generation of researchers as they keep societal implications of research in mind. “Hopefully, we can empower them to then carry these considerations through the rest of their scientific careers.”

Toward an Engaged Scientists Network

At the Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public at the University of California, Berkeley, there already exists a fellowship for scientists to delve into ethical, legal, and social implications of their research. But Witkowsky, her co-principal investigator Jodi Halpern, the Kavli center’s co-director, and their colleagues saw the opportunity for something more. Several of the boundary-spanning scientists they encountered ended up leaving the bench, because the science jobs they considered at universities or companies were not structured to leave room for exploring ethics, societal perspectives or public engagement.

When ethics and engagement work happen, even when it is valued by academic leaders, it tends to be “in separate departments that are not connected directly and intimately with the science,” Witkowsky says.

If a large network of discipline-spanning scientists existed, that might spur change in scientific training and the scientific job market. A new grant from The Kavli Foundation will support explorations to determine whether a network is needed and, if so, support the first steps toward creating it.

The work will begin with identifying scientists beyond Berkeley and Kavli’s networks who continue to conduct scientific research while also exploring interests in ethics and engagement. The Berkeley team will be on a special lookout for scientists who do fundamental research because academic culture in these areas is especially geared toward considering ethics as something to be dealt with by others.

Once they find researchers, the team will ask them what roadblocks they encounter when working on ethical, legal, or other implications of their research. These scientists will help the team determine whether a network will be beneficial. If yes, they will shape what the network looks like, because they’ll explain what would be valuable to them in a peer network and what opportunities they lack. The team will also reach out to universities, companies, and other potential employers, to ask them what help or incentive structure they’d need to create jobs for scientists who actively engage with ethics and the public.

A few of the fellows Witkowsky works with have landed discipline-spanning jobs, but not all. She says it’s not clear whether many more of those jobs exist and are simply hard to find or overlooked, or whether institutions are hindered from creating more transdisciplinary positions by the age-old tradition of siloing disciplines into departments. If the jobs exist, she says, “we want to highlight them and make them more visible.”

It would be difficult to find funding for this kind of exploration through traditional channels, Witkowsky says. Recognizing The Kavli Foundation’s reputation as a respected science funder, she adds, “this is a heavy hitter in the science field signaling the importance of elevating the work of scientists who are spanning these boundaries. I think that’s critical. I think it helps give legitimacy and power to the idea that we're trying to pursue this work.”

And if the work succeeds, the career trajectories available to tomorrow’s newly minted researchers might look very different, Witkowsky says. Their work will help build trust between scientists and society. "And they’re not going to be struggling uphill to justify why this work matters.”