Helga Nowotny Research Articles

Legal and ethical regulation of genetic research

The paper deals with the problems of genetic research regulation stemming from the peculiarities of this area of knowledge where research is practically inseparable from patient treatment, and cognitive practices are connected with the development and implementation of new devices, methodologies, and technologies to a much greater extent than in other areas of human activity. The issues of genetic research regulation are analyzed in the context of the concept suggested by Helga Nowotny and Giuseppe Testa distinguishing three human technologies of standardization through which control over the development of knowledge about genes is exercised. These three technologies are law, governance and bioethics, and the efficiency of their interaction is declared a necessary and sufficient condition for the successful development of molecular genetic sciences. The paper examines all the three technologies one by one, identifies the specifics and difficulties of their implementation in present-day Russian science, and assesses the genetic research prospects assuming the implementation of the aforementioned technologies. Particular attention is paid to institutionalization of ethics committees as an element of the genetic research regulation system. Substantiation is provided for the thesis that ethical committees should act as an institution combining rulemaking, management, and expert functions rather than as a structure capable of performing advisory and recommendatory functions only. The ability of the Russian society and state to withstand the grand challenges of our time is associated with the success in solving this problem.

Интернет и гетерохронность современной русской поэзии

Theorists of social media and the information society such as Manuel Castells have paid attention, first of all, to their modernizing and emancipatory potential. A new wave of such theorists, however, point out that social media promote not only the establishment of connections between different segments of society, but also the closing of “filter bubbles”, as they were designated by Eli Pariser. This essay is focused on depicting how “filter bubbles” enhance both innovative and archaizing types of poetic writing in a period when much new poetry is being published in social media. A vivid example of archaization is the cultural legitimization of amateurish genres and styles in some online communities. This process of divergence of innovative and conservative styles strengthens “non-simultaneity” – an English translation of the German term Ungleichzeitigkeit widespread due to the works of the philosopher Ernst Bloch. This paper is aimed at outlining a theory connecting the concepts of non-simultaneity, “filter bubbles” and “Eigenzeit” (a term coined by the philosopher Helga Nowotny) in the interpretation of online poetic publications.

The Cunning of Uncertainty, written by Helga Nowotny

The Cunning of Uncertainty, written by Helga Nowotny

Q&A: Helga Nowotny.

Austrian social scientist Helga Nowotny was president of the European Research Council between 2010 and 2013. Now a professor emerita of ETH Zurich and author of The Cunning of Uncertainty (Polity, 2015), Nowotny discusses the growing pressure to capitalize on academic research, and how countries can get it right in the absence of a universal recipe.

Book Review: “The Cunning of Uncertainty” by Helga Nowotny (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2015)

OMICS: A Journal of Integrative BiologyVol. 20, No. 5 Book ReviewBook Review: “The Cunning of Uncertainty” by Helga Nowotny (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2015)Barbara PrainsackBarbara PrainsackSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:19 May 2016https://doi.org/10.1089/omi.2016.0036AboutSectionsView articleView Full TextPDF/EPUB Permissions & CitationsPermissionsDownload CitationsTrack CitationsAdd to favorites Back To Publication ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail View article"Book Review: “The Cunning of Uncertainty” by Helga Nowotny (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2015)." OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology, 20(5), pp. 263–264FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 20Issue 5May 2016 InformationCopyright 2016, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.To cite this article:Barbara Prainsack.Book Review: “The Cunning of Uncertainty” by Helga Nowotny (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2015).OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology.May 2016.263-264.http://doi.org/10.1089/omi.2016.0036Published in Volume: 20 Issue 5: May 19, 2016Online Ahead of Print:April 20, 2016PDF download

Scientific method: Tales of the unexpected

Stuart Firestein relishes Helga Nowotny's study of uncertainty in science and society.

'This wound has spoilt everything': emotional capital and the experience of surgical site infections.

In this article we explore the experience of suffering from a surgical site infection, a common complication of surgery affecting around 5 per cent of surgical patients, via an interview study of 17 patients in the Midlands in the UK. Despite their prevalence, the experience of surgical site infections has received little attention so far. In spite of the impairment resulting from these iatrogenic problems, participants expressed considerable stoicism and we interpret this via the notion of emotional capital. This idea derives from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Helga Nowotny and Diane Reay and helps us conceptualise the emotional resources accumulated and expended in managing illness and in gaining the most from healthcare services. Participants were frequently at pains not to blame healthcare personnel or hospitals, often discounting the infection's severity, and attributing it to chance, to ‘germs’ or to their own failure to buy and apply wound care products. The participants' stoicism was thus partly afforded by their refusal to blame healthcare institutions or personnel. Where anger was described, this was either defused or expressed on behalf of another person. Emotional capital is associated with deflecting the possibility of complaint and sustaining a deferential and grateful position in relation to the healthcare system.

Preserve the European Research Council's legacy

A change in European Commission management styles under Horizon 2020 must not end the funding agency's focus on excellence, says Helga Nowotny.

Dare to know, dare to tell, dare to play

In her concluding statement summarising the discussions and themes presented during the workshops, lectures and concerts of the Aboagora symposium, Helga Nowotny underlines the need for researchers to be courageous and creative as they rethink the Enlightenment heritage in their various fields of research. Researchers today are part of an enormous epochal transformation in science, technology and institution building, she claims. This is a world largely of our own making which provides new opportunities as well as challenges and in which the future cannot be known. Yet, Nowotny points out, we continue with the desire to influence the future and we try to prepare for the encounter with a messy world of enormous complexity, uncertainty and contingency around us. In this situation, she concludes, music can provide science with an important lesson, namely: it is played. Playfulness can provide one possible mode to prepare for the future: by playing one learns to explore and to trust one’s own curiosity. Thus, the Enlightenment is unfinished, but it is also exciting in being unfinished.

Naked genes: reinventing the human in the molecular age

The molecular life sciences are making visible what was once invisible. Yet the more we learn about our own biology, the less we are able to fit this knowledge into an integrated whole. Life is divided into new sub-units and reassembled into new forms: from genes to clones, from embryonic stages to the building-blocks of synthetic biology. Extracted from their scientific and social contexts, these new entities become not only visible but indeed naked: ready to assume an essential status of their own and take on multiple values and meanings as they pass from labs to courts, from patent offices to parliaments and back. In Naked Genes, leading science scholar Helga Nowotny and molecular biologist Giuseppe Testa examine the interaction between these dramatic advances in the life sciences and equally dramatic political reconfigurations of our societies. Considering topics ranging from assisted reproduction and personalized medicine to genetic sports doping, they reveal both surprising continuities and radical discontinuities between the latest advances in the life sciences and long-standing human traditions.

Interview with Helga Nowotny

Helga Nowotny is a founding member and president of the European Research Council, which was set up to support and encourage scientists, scholars and engineers to be adventurous in their research. Here she talks to Erika Burrows and Vitali Vitaliev about what motivates her into her sixth decade of work.

Keeping Europe's Basic Research Agency on Track

Helga Nowotny played a key role in the successful start of the European Research Council. As its president, the Austrian sociologist still has two major tasks ahead of her.

European Research Council battles bureaucracy

Helga Nowotny explains how reform at the funding body could free scientists from onerous paperwork.

Helga Nowotny. Insatiable Curiosity: Innovation in a Fragile Future. Translated by Mitch Cohen. (Inside Technology). 168 pp. Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press, 2008. $30 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsHelga Nowotny. Insatiable Curiosity: Innovation in a Fragile Future. Translated by Mitch Cohen. (Inside Technology). 168 pp. Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press, 2008. $30 (cloth).John PickstoneJohn Pickstone Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 101, Number 3September 2010 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/657236 Views: 23Total views on this site © 2010 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Books Forum authors in conversation

In this interview, anthropologist Paul Rabinow and sociologist Helga Nowotny discuss interdisciplinary collaborations with life scientists and the societal role of bioethics in the context of their new publications reviewed in this issue's Books Forum.

A voice for science in Europe

An interview with Helga Nowotny, the new President of the European Research Council's Scientific Council about budgets, bureaucracy and bringing changes to the European research landscape

Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities (review)

Reviewed by: Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities Bonnie Shulman (bio) Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities. By Sandra Harding. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Pp. vii+283. $79.95/$22.95. What can be done to transform modern science and politics, which currently deliver their benefits only to an elite few, into truly democratic practices that serve all of the world’s people? This is the question Sandra Harding sets out to answer in Sciences from Below. Along the way she presents a stunning synthesis of research from post-positivist, feminist, and postcolonial science studies scholars. Her work, although unique in its attempt to integrate these different research agendas, shares the goals of the group of STS activists who advocate for an “applied science studies” to inform social justice projects. The focus of Harding’s analysis is on (Western) modernity and “the ways it remains haunted by anxieties about the feminine and the primitive, both of which are associated with the traditional” (p. 1). Why has this scholar, known for her research in feminist and postcolonial science studies, turned her attention to modernity studies? It is, she writes, in order to “obstruct the way that the modernity vs. tradition binary shapes research projects” (p. 19). In Part I, “Problems with Modernity’s Science and Politics,” Harding reviews the strengths and limitations of the work of three STS scholars who have critiqued the way science and politics are currently organized: the French anthropologist of science Bruno Latour, the German sociologist and environmental theorist Ulrich Beck, and the team of European sociologists headed by Michael Gibbons, Helga Nowotny, and Peter Scott. These three different approaches to rethinking modern science and politics share some commonalities. All three reject postmodernism because it gets stuck in critique and does not offer a positive alternative to transform science and politics. Along with Harding, all three argue that science and politics are inescapably entangled, that changing one inevitably involves changing the other. On the one hand, “science appropriates to itself as merely technical matters decisions that are actually social and political ones” (p. 25). On the other hand, policymakers often appeal to science to legitimize their own projects. One might say one hand washes the other. All three are also mostly gender-blind and make only perfunctory gestures toward science and technology in global contexts. Thus in Part II, “Views from (Western) Modernity’s Peripheries,” Harding reviews the strengths and limitations of scholarship from three social movements at the margins of modernity: Western women’s, postcolonial, and third-world women’s science and technology studies. In Part III, “Interrogating Tradition: Challenges and Possibilities,” Harding uses standpoint theory to look at science and politics “from [End Page 682] below”—from the standpoint of women and the world’s other least-advantaged peoples. In the final chapter she offers her own “modest proposal”—a vision of transformed sciences and politics. Harding’s strongest contribution is the construction of a bridge between traditional science studies scholars and feminist and postcolonial science and technology studies. She looks at each research agenda from the perspective of the others. She points out how all three analyses from Part I “provide powerful justifications for feminist and postcolonial projects even though they do not put their arguments to this goal. In turn, those social movements could effectively make use of some of [traditional science studies’] arguments” (p. 77). She poses some provocative questions: For example, on page 149 she wonders what a “world of mutually, partially independent scientific and technological traditions and projects [would] look like.” Harding is a courageous public intellectual trying to understand how others see us and themselves. For me, the most disappointing aspect of the book was the final chapter. Harding’s modest (critics might say outrageous) proposal entails “start[ing] off research from women’s lives in households” (p. 225). I was eagerly anticipating some concrete suggestions as to how “research on nuclear fission, the ozone hole, or the philosophy of science affects the flourishing of households and those responsible for them” (p. 233), but, alas, Harding leaves us with the acknowledgment that this proposal will be “difficult to pursue” and that it provides a...

Insatiable curiosity: innovation in a fragile future

An influential scholar in science studies argues that innovation tames the insatiable and limitless curiosity driving science, and that society's acute ambivalence about this is an inevitable legacy of modernity. Curiosity is the main driving force behind scientific activity. Scientific curiosity, insatiable in its explorations, does not know what it will find, or where it will lead. Science needs autonomy to cultivate this kind of untrammeled curiosity; innovation, however, responds to the needs and desires of society. Innovation, argues influential European science studies scholar Helga Nowotny, tames the passion of science, harnessing it to produce deliverables. Science brings uncertainties; innovation successfully copes with them. Society calls for both the passion for knowledge and its taming. This ambivalence, Nowotny contends, is an inevitable result of modernity. In Insatiable Curiosity, Nowotny explores the strands of the often unexpected intertwining of science and technology and society. Uncertainty arises, she writes, from an oversupply of knowledge. The quest for innovation is society's response to the uncertainties that come with scientific and technological achievement. Our dilemma is how to balance the immense but unpredictable potential of science and technology with our acknowledgement that not everything that can be done should be done. We can escape the old polarities of utopias and dystopias, writes Nowotny, by accepting our ambivalence-as a legacy of modernism and a positive cultural resource.

Controverses, kennissociologie en wetenschapsproductie: zoeken naar legitimiteit: een historische rondgang met Helga Nowotny

This article takes Helga Nowotny’s work as starting point for a guided tour in 30-40 years of sociology of knowledge debates. Consecutive scientific controversies, from nuclear energy to climate change, reveal to be focal points of discussion and innovation. Helga Nowotny’s work provides fruitful perspectives on more comprehensive trends and mutual reinforcement in and between the fields of sociology of knowledge, political sociology and environmental sociology.

Reflections for Looking Forward

Insatiable Curiosity . Innovation in a Fragile Future. By Helga Nowotny . Translated from the German () by Mitch Cohen. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008. 193 pp. $30, £19.95. ISBN 9780262141031. In this meditation on the future, Nowotny argues that science brings uncertainties and innovation subsequently allows us to cope with them.