Responsibility+(Banks)

Responsibility refers to the perceived or implied relationship of scientists and technologists to their research subjects, expected users of products, the environment, and/or society. Responsibility is an emerging object of study in Science and Technology Studies and the first essay that articulates the components of responsibility are Elise McCarthy and Christopher Kelty’s paper “Responsibility and Nanotechnology.” One cannot talk about responsibility without first considering the nature of risk. Responsibility is, in essence, assessing the introduction of a certain kind of risk, into a given system McCarthy and Kelty describe it as such,

“Risk is very often part of a pair: risk //and// responsibility. Wherever risk is salient, respomsibility is its implicit shadow. Measuring risk allows individuals and organizations to make //responsible// choices; taking unnecessary risks is seen as irresponsible; imporper or inadequate risk assessment can lead to fault and hence //responsibility// for harms, and incalculable risks induce a responsibility for future harms – perhaps an impossible one.”

=Responsibility for Nano Silver= [|Nano silver used in washing machines]is an example of risk and responsibility in science and the nanoscience industry. Washing machine manufactures were offering washers with silver nano particles built into the drums. These drums were meant to disinfect water and kill germs. While there was research done on consumers’ potential exposure to nano silver within the home, no research was done on the cumulative effects of nano silver in municipal water facilities and groundwater. When it was found that large amounts of silver were contaminating ground water systems, sale of nano silver washing machines was discontinued.

=Responsibility and Risk= There is already plenty of literature on risk. Most famously, Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens have written extensively on the risk society and the mitigation of risk by individuals and organizations within a “risk society.” Many institutions measure risk so that they can assess the cost of doing business. Costs can include (among other things) remediation of unintended consequences and possible failure to achieve end goals. Mitigating risk, according to Giddens and Beck, is one of the most powerful (if not the most powerful) forces shaping modern society. While societies have always had to deal with the risk of catastrophe, it is only in modern society that we must grapple with unpredictable disasters produced by civilization itself. Calculating the likelihood of failure or harm drives nations into a wide variety of actions such as resource wars, constructing complicated regulation regimes, or sustainable development.

To be concerned about responsibility is to implicitly consider the mitigation and possible remediation from failure or unforeseen harm caused by a product. In the case of McCarthy and Kelty, they are interested in, “the risks that nanomaterials pose to biology and environment, and the risks that research on this area poses to the health of nanotechnology itself.” They show that scientists that are interested in risk as a research subject in and of itself, have a hard time acquiring funding. The research of risk and responsibility, in and of itself, is seen as policy or an implicit category within any research that is being conducted.

McCarthy and Kelty quote a researcher who was denied funding for investigating risk as saying,

“They would use different rules, or say: that there’s nothing new about [this], of course we’re going to do this. Why are you calling it out? Of course anybody’s going to do this. It’s kind of like, well, of course you’re going to have to raise money to start a company. Why are you calling it out? It’s a natural part of your path. It was more like it was [pause] they did not see it as an endeavor of its own, you do it at the end of the time. Downstream you run a toxicology test. Why is this science, right?”

How nanotechnology (unintentionally) interacts with environments and bodies is not considered worthy of its own research project. This sort of research is expected as part of ongoing research into the applications of nanotechnology. For mainstream science, responsibility is not something that one researches head-on, it is something taken up during the research process. Sismondo describes the products of a laboratory this way:

“Not only data but phenomena themselves are constructed in laboratories— //laboratories// are places of work, and what is found in them is not nature but rather the product of much human effort. Inputs are extracted and refined, or are invented for particular purposes, shielded from outside influences, and placed in innovative contexts (Latour & Woolgar, 1979; Knorr Cetina, 1981; Hacking, 1983). Experimental systems are tinkered with until stabilized, able to behave consistently (Rheinberger, 1997). Laboratory phenomena, then, are not in themselves natural but are made to stand in for nature; in their purity and artificiality they are typically seen as more fundamental and revealing of nature than the natural world itself can be.”

From this perspective, responsibility must always be taken up as a part of laboratory science. Everything that comes out of the lab is artificial, the product of some kind of “human effort”, and thus someone can be held liable for any harm done by it. Scientists working in nanotechnology are very aware of the bad press genetically modified foods received and the subsequent falling out of industry research and development. By explicitly investigating the possible environmental and public health effects of nanotechnology, scientist can find out about possible harms before they become widespread, or discover existing problems and take steps to remediate them. In the former scenario, responsibility takes the form of //being responsible,// whereas in the latter case scientists are //taking responsibility for// the ramifications of a past action.

=Responsibility as Basic Research= McCarthy and Kelty conclude by saying that “responsibility must be constructed and understood as something //novel,// something scientifically interesting, and something in urgent need of funding and basic research.” Otherwise, environmental and public health impact studies are relegated to downstream impact assessments that may catch the problem when it has already become too expensive/difficult/widespread to fully remediate. Researching responsibility then, becomes a reflexive task in which taking responsibility for responsibility means you hold yourself responsible for any unaccounted for risks. This is a difficult bind for many institutions, because while they do not want to be responsible for a natural disaster, they also do not want to be the group that brings down the nanoscience industry with a discovery of severe adverse health impacts.