ArticlePublic understanding of science (Bristol, England)2018
Science to the rescue or contingent progress? Comparing 10 years of public, expert and policy discourses on new and emerging science and technology in the United Kingdom.
Article in Public understanding of science (Bristol, England), 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Public alignment with longevity biotechnology: an analysis of framing in surveys and opinion studies.Biogerontology · 2024Review
- Article
- Multi Scale Ethics-Why We Need to Consider the Ethics of AI in Healthcare at Different Scales.Science and engineering ethics · 2022Article
- Global Catastrophic Risk and the Drivers of Scientist Attitudes Towards Policy.Science and engineering ethics · 2022Article
- Knowing when to talk? Plant genome editing as a site for pre-engagement institutional reflexivity.Public understanding of science (Bristol, England) · 2021Article
- What we know about effective public engagement on CRISPR and beyond.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Over the past 10 years, numerous public debates on new and emerging science and technologies have taken place in the United Kingdom. In this article, we characterise the discourses emerging from these debates and compare them to the discourses in analogous expert scientific and policy reports. We find that while the public is broadly supportive of new scientific developments, they see the risks and social and ethical issues associated with them as unpredictable but inherent parts of the developments. In contrast, the scientific experts and policymakers see risks and social and ethical issues as manageable and quantifiable with more research and knowledge. We argue that these differences amount to two different sociotechnical imaginaries or views of science and how it shapes our world - an elite imaginary of 'science to the rescue' shared by scientists and policymakers and public counter-imaginary of 'contingent progress'. We argue that these two imaginaries indicate that, but also help explain why, public dialogue has had limited impact on public policy.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.