Low expectations within conservative wing of discourse coalition for innovation and technoscience: integrating vanguard visions to therapeutic consent

Abstract

Drawing on the sociology of expectations, this paper inquires what objects, promises, and audiences are invoked in two examples of biotechnology discourse on organoids, MCELS (Multicellular Engineered Living Systems) in the USA and REBIRTH (From REgenerative BIology to Reconstructive THerapy) in Germany, and how that affects therapeutic consent. Therapeutic consent discussion in the literature has been focusing on singular discourse on the objects of biotechnology. This paper focuses on making of organoids embedded in two very large research projects of biotechnology in two comparative cases to fill the gap between cultures of imaginations and discourses. The paper claims that (a) both projects are connected through shared objects within vanguard visions joined through a discourse coalition. The discourse coalitions that are making them further can be connected at the object level both by the low expectations and the techno-scientific imaginaries that are more relevant to public imagination by nested frameworks of vanguard visions and sociotechnical imaginaries. This connection is necessary for the object to be considered within the research and development of the object, whereas when the research programme is finished and the object itself is delivered, the low expectation and the calibration thereafter is dependent on this network (b) When the object [organoid] itself is a research object and a part of a discourse coalition is and an applied healthcare object at the same time, lowering of expectations and recalibration of the higher expectations are necessary for debates around consent as enabling conditions of consent in the very first place.