Academic literature on the topic 'Technoscientific controversy'

How can technoscientific controversies be interpreted in terms of their public communication? This essay explores the case of nanotechnology to describe how one of the most innovative and cutting-edge technoscientific fields has moved from a grey goo scenario of PCTS that described similarities with biotechnology and GMOs, underlining the risks of potential conflicts between science and society, to the idea of an ‘internal’ controversy, that is a debate mainly present in discussions within professional groups. The conclusions suggest how the study of public communication of technoscientific controversies, and in particular of internal controversies such as nanotechnology, has lead to consideration of the idea of moving from a risk frame in public participation initiatives to a more open discussion on daily life, work activities, technological innovation, cultural representations, art and others.

The discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation—an inflection point in postwar cosmology—has not lacked chroniclers, but few have drawn deeply upon the available archival record. Many accounts emphasize the serendipitous manner in which the radiation was detected. This article redefines the relative contributions of luck, skill, and circumstance to the discovery by thickening the contexts in which it occurred. In its emphasis upon the material conditions of scientific enquiry, the development of technical expertise, and the permeability of disciplinary boundaries, the article situates the discovery in the sort of explanatory context more familiar from histories of Cold War nuclear and electronics research, where funds flowed freely across a broad front of institutions and subject fields, underwriting innovation and exchange, and incentivizing the instrumentalization of basic knowledge to address real world problems—in this case, microwave radio noise. It was not research to resolve the “big-bang”/“steady-state” controversy that pulled the radiation within range of detection, but a protean technoscientific program to improve signal-to-noise ratios. The accumulation of proficiency in microwave communications at Bell Laboratories, where the radiation was detected, was as significant to the breakthrough as the expertise in theoretical astrophysics available at Princeton, where the Bell Labs measurements were linked to the “big bang.” Princeton physicists, led by Robert Dicke, had already embarked on their own independent effort to detect the radiation, but evidence suggests they may not have succeeded absent the instrumental contributions made by Bell Labs.

<p>這篇文章針對1909年社會學家韋伯（Max Weber）和化學家奧斯華德（Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald）關於文化能量學的爭議，進行一種繞射的閱讀（diffractive reading），從中生產出切合當代人類世困局的觀點。首先，我彰顯當代社會複雜的能量地景，尤其是石化資本主義的高耗能模式。其次，我探討韋伯對奧斯華德的批判，聚焦在藝術和技術的利益群集，以及韋伯多元主義和奧斯華德統合理論之間的張力。接著，我討論晚近學界對奧斯華德能量論的重探，強調涉及技術科學的分子轉向，其促成有機體地景的多樣化。最後，我重新思考能量超有機體的概念，一種雜揉的綜合體，及其可能的方向。</p> <p>&nbsp;</p><p>This paper presents a diffractive reading of the controversy on cultural energeticism involving sociologist Max Weber and chemistry Nobel laureate Wilhelm Ostwald in 1909 to provide a relevant perspective for the Anthropocene conjunction. First, I highlight the complex energetic landscape of contemporary society, especially the high-energy-consuming model of fossil capitalism. Second, I discuss Weber&rsquo;s critique of Ostwald, focusing on the clustered interests of art and technology, as well as the tension between Weber&rsquo;s pluralism and Ostwald&rsquo;s aspiration for a unifying theory of everything. Third, I discuss some recent revaluations of Ostwald&rsquo;s energeticism, emphasizing the technoscientific molecular turn that has diversified the organismic landscape. Finally, I reassess the conception of an energetic superorganism&mdash;a hybrid synthesis&mdash; and its potential future direction. </p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

This article expands on recent studies of machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) algorithmsthat crucially depend on benchmark datasets, often called ‘ground truths.’ These ground-truth datasets gather input-data and output-targets, thereby establishing what can be retrieved computationally and evaluated statistically. I explore the case of the Tumor nEoantigen SeLection Alliance (TESLA), a consortium-based ground-truthing project in personalized cancer immunotherapy, where the ‘truth’ of the targets—immunogenic neoantigens—to be retrieved by the would-be AI algorithms depended on a broad technoscientific network whose setting up implied important organizational and material infrastructures. The study shows that instead of grounding an undisputable ‘truth’, the TESLA endeavor ended up establishing a contestable reference, the biology of neoantigens and how to measure their immunogenicity having slightly evolved alongside this four-year project. However, even if this controversy played down the scope of the TESLA ground truth, it did not discredit the whole undertaking. The magnitude of the technoscientific efforts that the TESLA project set into motion and the needs it ultimately succeeded in filling for the scientific and industrial community counterbalanced its metrological uncertainties, effectively instituting its contestable representation of ‘true’ neoantigens within the field of personalized cancer immunotherapy (at least temporarily). More generally, this case study indicates that the enforcement of ground truths, and what it leaves out, is a necessary condition to enable AI technologies in personalized medicine.

Societal Impact StatementThe problem of genetically modified maize contamination in Mexico is the result of both planned and unplanned consequences of scientific and political choices. We show how a risk management strategy based on the modernist dichotomy between “modern” and “native” has failed to protect Mexican landraces and has marginalized other forms of knowledge that are urgently needed to understand and support the fluidity of Mexican biocultural landscapes. Farmers' seed systems are a fundamental source of crop resilience and evolution. They can constitute safe pathways for creating new maize varieties able to withstand climate and societal changes.Summary In 2001, an alert on the contamination of Mexican maize landraces by genetically modified (GM) maize spurred new actions to conserve the world's biggest reservoir of maize genetic diversity. We analyze how the largest maize collection effort in Mexican history, and the definition of the conservation procedures employed in it, either involved or marginalized different approaches to this environmental problem. The article is grounded in the sociohistorical analysis of the controversy of GM maize contamination and brings together new historiographical perspectives on Mexican scientific and political interest in native maize. It also draws on ethnographic approaches, extended fieldwork, and analysis of data from Mexican government agencies. We show how different epistemological traditions have made the risk of GM maize contamination (in)visible and thereby generated normative choices. We illustrate how the GMO controversy brought the theme of native maize back onto the Mexican political and scientific agenda. The normativity that shaped the controversy in the 2000s influenced current knowledge and how the problem of GM maize introgression is still addressed today. The entanglements between biotechnology, native landraces, and farmers' practices are too dense to be “scientized” and kept separate to be made manageable as areas of purely technical “risk.” The result is a geography of maize infused with all sorts of temporalities and materiality, which escapes the bounds of technoscientific framings. This intricate environment‐making process calls for new collaborations among epistemic cultures to tackle the possible consequences of GMOs for agrobiodiversity, seed systems, and their resilience.

A l'ère du numérique, les langages et les gènes sont soumis à des enjeux et à des contraintes technico-économiques similaires. Ces innovations biotechnologiques perturbent les imaginaires culturels et interrogent les catégorisations du vivant, entre nature et culture, humain et non humain. A partir des outils réflexifs de la sémiologie et de la linguistique, ce travail doctoral propose de revisiter l'univers de la génétique appliquée au domaine agronomique, à la recherche des proximités langue/gène, tant sur les plans étymologique et lexico-sémantique, qu'épistémologique et structural. La visée est de relier les deux sphères scientifique et sociétale et de jeter les bases de l'agrosémiologie en tant qu'approche interdisciplinaire fondée sur l'alliance des sciences du langage, des sciences de la vie et des sciences de l'ingénieur. Les principes théorique et méthodologique de la recherche sont fondés sur les modélisations de la sémiologie des indices et de l'imaginaire socio-culturel développées par A.-M. Houdebine dans la lignée saussurienne (Hjelmslev, Barthes), en incluant les apports d'Eco. Le point de vue interdisciplinaire fournit également l'occasion d'explorer le courant biosémiotique inspiré de Peirce. Deux sortes de discours médiatiques servent d'illustrations et de matériaux pour la constitution des fondements de l'Imaginaire de la génétique : l'un concerne l'affaire des OGM et l'autre, la sélection génétique bovine. Ces analyses dévoilent les idéaux scientifiques de la génétique ainsi que les imaginaires socioculturels qui en émanent. Les affinités entre les gènes et les signes sont impliquées dans la structuration des fictions et des idéalisations collectives, celles qui ont opéré dans le passé lors des épisodes raciste et eugéniste, celles qui s'expriment dans les discours de crise actuels, et enfin, celles qui annoncent les défis technologiques et sociétaux à venir. Sur ces bases, des éléments méthodologiques sont dégagés pour la formulation des propositions agrosémiologiques finales
In the digital age, languages and genes are subject to similar technical and economic issues and constraints. These biotechnological innovations disrupt cultural imaginaries and question the categorizations of life, between nature and culture, human and non human. Using the reflexive tools of semiology and linguistics, this doctoral work proposes to discover the field of genetics applied to the agronomic domain, looking for proximities language/gene, starting with an etymological and lexical semantic research up to an epistemological and structural one. The aim is to connect the two scientific and societal spheres and to lay the foundations of agrosemiology as an interdisciplinary approach based on the alliance of language sciences, life sciences and engineering sciences. The theoretical and methodological principles of the research are based on the modelling approaches of the Semiology of Indices and the Socio-cultural Imaginary developed by A.-M. Houdebine in the Saussurean lineage (Hjelmslev, Barthes), including Eco's contributions to the field. The interdisciplinary perspective also provides an opportunity to explore the biosemiotic theory inspired by Peirce. Two types of media discourses serve as illustrations and materials for the constitution of the foundations of what we call the Imaginary of Genetics: one concerns the GMO issue and the other, the bovine genetic selection. These analyses highlight the scientific ideals of genetics as well as the socio-cultural imaginaries that emanate from them. The affinities between genes and signs are involved in the structuring of fictions and collective idealizations, those that operated in the past during racist and eugenic periods, those expressed in current crisis discourses, and finally, those announcing future technological and societal challenges. These are the bases on which we identify and propose methodological elements for the agrosemiological research

As a pervasive policy framework in recent decades, techno-market fixes arose from a convergence between ecological modernization and neoliberal environmentalism. Opposing such techno-market fixes as ‘false solutions’, counter-publics have linked citizens’ groups with critical experts, thus generating greater public controversy. This has broadened opportunities for various alternatives which incur lighter resource burdens, enhance socio-economic equity, localize production-consumption circuits and devise technical means for those aims. Such alternatives become more than mere technical-administrative blueprints when multi-actor alliances become counter-publics confronting the dominant agenda; their alternatives often combine eco-localization with grassroots innovation. Rival agendas can be understood as sociotechnical; each agenda expresses a sociotechnical imaginary co-producing a distinctive form of natural resources, technoscientific knowledge and social order. Together these concepts provide a big picture for understanding various techno-market fixes, their controversies and alternative futures.

In 2009 the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive set a statutory mandate for renewable energy in transport fuel, citing the need to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This mandate expanded biofuels from edible feedstock, thus provoking controversy over multiple harms. The obligatory market incentivized land-use changes in the global South, in turn restricting resource access for local food production, while disguising various harms through sustainability criteria. As a key rationale, the EU mandate would help stimulate the EU’s Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy (KBBE): technoscientific progress would bring ‘advanced biofuels’ using only non-edible feedstock. Meanwhile this future promise served to perpetuate conventional biofuels. Even before the Directive’s enactment, critics provoked opposition over several issues, for example, the EU’s resource plunder, significant harms beyond the sustainability criteria, lax standards for vehicle emissions, and a delay in electric vehicles as replacements. Despite such opposition, the mandate continued to permit the most harmful feedstock for at least another decade after the 2009 Directive. This outcome resulted from prioritizing an ‘investment climate’ for the KBBE rather than GHG reductions.