To access the document click here, Pathways to Integration.

This paper was produced by the Genomics Society and Ethics Advisory Committee subcommittee on Pathways to Integration. It will be of interest to researchers engaging in integrated research funded by Genome BC and Genome Canada, policy-makers and scholars working in related areas, including nanotechnology and environmental science projects. Genome BC uses an integrated research funding model that involves the social sciences and humanities (SSH) as an essential part of research projects in order to ensure that societal aspects of genomics are integrated with genomics science. Such an interdisciplinary strategy is intended to engage researchers from a variety of disciplines in order that, as the cases cited in this paper demonstrate, the results will offer a shared understanding of issues related to the research in question.
 
This white paper includes a summary of the historical dimensions of genomics research, key national and international policy developments and a general overview of integrated research. The relationship between integrated research and the enhancement of social and economic benefits is emphasised, while the development of capacity building in integration methodologies, and the role of stakeholder networks in genomics research, are also discussed. Several international examples of integrated research are highlighted, pointing to the applicability of the research model in the future creation of responsible innovation. We offered some Genome BC-supported examples of this kind of research, which resulted in the production of ‘shared understandings’ across disciplines. The implications for future research activities and refined communication processes within projects are important. Genome BC-supported projects have in some cases built stakeholder interests into research outcomes in the form of improved technologies and industry guidelines (Acid Rock Drainage), and co-designed practices (BC BioLibrary Project).
 
The paper draws attention to the strengths of this kind of work and its potential for the future. Indeed, integrated research funding opportunities give Genome BC researchers an opportunity to stand out as leaders in this emerging field. Crucially, social sciences and humanities scholars embedded in genomics research projects will help to create a new level of awareness and response to social and economic issues in genomics research. There is likewise an enhanced potential for attention being paid to the social and economic benefits of such research. Moreover, an important hallmark of genomics research projects that are co-designed by SSH researchers and scientists is the increased awareness of social contexts, and thus there is a more pointed set of research questions produced, thereby resulting in more fruitful outcomes. Finally, integrated research efforts will lead to the creation of new, socially robust knowledge.

Given the overriding need for genomics science to develop seriously relevant R&D for sustainability, environmental damage reduction and so on, we must find ways to integrate into our strategies the kinds of reflexivity in science and in SSH that will create new knowledge by sharpening the questions that are asked in the research we support. This will position Genome BC ‘ahead of the game’ in terms of regulatory needs, responsiveness and identification of limits.

This in turn will help to:
 (i) attune science, and science policy (funding and strategy) to the diversity of R&D portfolios and trajectories,
(ii) raise awareness of the distributional effects of particular R&D policies,
(iii) foster the need to take into account both long and short-term policy goals in genomics research,  
(iv) build a vital awareness of the directional commitments that are contained in given R&D trajectories,
(v) develop awareness among researchers and funders that the social and economic implications embedded in R&D initiatives must be identified and tested, thus ensuring that all future genomics research supported by Genome BC will be alert to its social and economic contexts and thus able to flourish with integrity.

To access the document click here, Pathways to Integration.