Novel Reflections on the Autonomy and Responsibility of Science.

Fabian Hempel

doi:10.3389/frma.2021.615357

Abstract

This paper explores how cultural understandings of the autonomy and responsibility of science in modern society are manifested in two contemporary science novels about research misconduct in biomedical research. In doing so, it looks at several facets of the societal impact of and on public and private biomedical research, especially with respect to changing authority relations and their epistemic and institutional consequences. The analysis focuses on the multi-layered ways in which social and epistemic interests are treated in Allegra Goodman’s Intuition and Jennifer Rohn’s The Honest Look. Goodman’s novel demonstrates how, intensified by the economization of science, internal cultural and institutional aspects of the scientific field enable social configurations that, among others, encourage scientific malpractice and lead to the delay of research projects epistemically and socially worth pursuing. In contrast, Rohn’s novel exemplifies the corrosion of the ideal scientific ethos by profit-driven practices in private-sector biomedical sciences. The concluding discussion juxtaposes these findings with pertinent contemporary phenomena in modern science systems to provide a more substantial understanding of the interpenetration between science and other social spheres.

Highlights

The social institutions of science are inherently linked to the concept of modernity, as it is the advanced functional differentiation of modern societies that has enabled the development of science into a distinct social subsystem
While a bijective interpretation of the novels, and fictional literature in general, is neither feasible nor desirable, the preceding analysis and this discussion leads to the assertion that through depicting internal and external distortions of the classical scientific ethos, both novels represent literary thought experiments of contemporary research that reinforce and deconstruct the cultural ideal autonomy and social responsibility of science in modern societies
In contrast to the ambiguous title of the paper, my reading of Intuition and The Honest Look has not necessarily produced completely novel insights into the autonomy and social responsibility of contemporary science in modern society. It has taken the cultural understanding of science as an avenue for a sociological exploration of how these notions are manifested in two salient literary narratives that imagine two different yet comparable tales of research misconduct

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The social institutions of science are inherently linked to the concept of modernity, as it is the advanced functional differentiation of modern societies that has enabled the development of science into a distinct social subsystem. Employing the realist science novels Intuition (Goodman, 2010) and The Honest Look (Rohn, 2010b) as tools for sociological inquiry, I explore cultural understandings of the autonomy and social responsibility of science, with a focus on biomedical research and the epistemic and institutional consequences of changing authority relationships. Scientists who have reviewed Intuition (Thomas, 2006: 1,235) and The Honest Look (Herndon, 2010: 1,039) describe their stories as plausible, credible, and thematically relevant to current developments in modern science systems Both novels depict prototypical scenarios of the organization and practice of public and private biomedical research and are well-situated to explore the autonomy and social responsibility of science. The tale of Claire Cyrus alludes to the dysfunctional consequences of dominant economic considerations that emphasize the need to maintain an organizational front that presents the product as valuable and the company as innovative, which supersedes the basic scientific imperative to find errors in data and to doubleproof theoretical and empirical insights (Schimank, 2021: 162)

DISCUSSION

CONCLUSION