The rapid development in biomedicine creates knowledge-intensive policy fields on national and international arenas. In our ongoing project “Biomodifying technologies in change” we study presumably game-changing technologies such as CRISPR-cas9, iPS cells, xenotransplantation and 3D bioprinting. The project could be categorized as part of an ”engaged program”, using Sismondo’s terminology (2008), in that we do not separate the epistemological dimensions from the political aspects of the science practices we study. Rather, we understand language and material processes in research as already in themselves always normative. Hence, the strife to make transparent and democratize scientific and technological processes, is somehow built into the research scope itself - even if not a directly activist agenda.

One of the aims of the project is to understand how “responsible researchers” are fostered. We look into how ethical reflexivity is expressed, practiced and understood in the day-to-day of biomedical research environments. But what happens to our knowledge production when we make biomedical researchers engage in this bird’s-eye view on their research and its socio-cultural circumstances? How can neither taking a distanced position, nor engaging in direct activism but rather pushing toward areas we consider possible hotbeds for public debate be further theoretically conceptualized? What does such an endeavor imply for our role as STS scholars? And how does that connect to the tendency to engage humanities and social science scholars as interpreters and mediators in cross-disciplinary projects in knowledge-intensive policy fields, such as ours ? In what way is the symmetry principle (Bloor, 1976) affected, when value-laden initiatives as ethical reflexivity and public engagement is treated as an inherent good or as “truths” to be pursued?