Situated Practice and the Emergence of Ethical Research

Abstract

This article explores the role scientists at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), a US federal science agency, played in researching and testing vaccines against the human papillomavirus (HPV). Drawing upon archival sources and oral history interview data, I challenge narratives that attribute the design of HPV vaccines to profit motive. Instead, I show that the researchers who developed the technology attempted to construct ethical approaches to vaccine development based on the values that emerged from their situated environments of technological, organizational, and institutional constraint. I argue that interpretations of “translational research” native to the NCI influenced these researchers’ efforts to design and test HPV vaccines. The organizational culture of translational research emerging in the NCI positioned intramural research as a countervailing and supplementary force to market-oriented translational research and development. Over time, NCI researchers’ conceptions of the Institute’s role allowed them to develop understandings of ethical HPV vaccine research as oriented toward addressing cervical cancer health disparities, especially in developing nations. NCI scientists’ understanding of their role in serving the public good through continued HPV vaccine innovation reflects the material and political economic environment they faced at different historical junctures that constrained the possibilities for innovation and ethical action.

Predicting Success in the Embryology Lab: The Use of Algorithmic Technologies in Knowledge Production

“…This is partly a result of the input needed from professionals to make the technology “work” and the questions staff raise about perceived subjective practices. STS scholars often conceptualize technologies as situated (Aviles 2018; Coutard and Guy 2007). In the context of increased interest in the social life of algorithms (Ziewitz 2016), we suggest that algorithms themselves can also be conceptualized as situated practice.…”

Environing Innovation: Toward an Ecological Pragmatism of Scientific Practice

“…Robin Wolfe Scheffler (2019) has explicitly connected the early efforts in chemotherapy Keating and Cambrosio discuss to broader attempts by NCI administrators to make the organization's activities accountable to both scientific and political interpretations of the Institute's mission. Aviles (2018) similarly shows how the paradigm of translational research, which Keating and Cambrosio note emerged in the NCI during the 1990s (see also Cambrosio et al 2006), was cultivated by NCI scientists and administrators in an effort to build durable connections that would shepherd emerging laboratory discoveries through the Institute's now-expansive clinical trial apparatus (Keating and Cambrosio 2011:348-49). In this instance, Keating and Cambrosio's commitment to decenter the NCI leads them to analytically underspecify how translational research emerged even before this period from attempts within the NCI to elaborate a program for cancer research governance that was accountable to how NCI actors interpreted the scientific possibilities of innovations as well as their duty to ensure these innovations improve the health of an increasingly global public.…”

“…In this instance, Keating and Cambrosio's commitment to decenter the NCI leads them to analytically underspecify how translational research emerged even before this period from attempts within the NCI to elaborate a program for cancer research governance that was accountable to how NCI actors interpreted the scientific possibilities of innovations as well as their duty to ensure these innovations improve the health of an increasingly global public. Where other STS scholars have misattributed the emergence of translational research to market forces penetrating universities and the neoliberal capture of government regulators like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), it is increasingly important to highlight the origins of translational policies in entrenched scaffolds generated by NCI actors' attempts to make federally funded research accountable to the organization's dual scientific and health mission (see Aviles 2018).…”