On December 6-7, the ResBios team headed over to Brussels for our final Mutual Learning Workshop and the ResBios conference on Responsibility in research & innovation. Challenges for the biosciences and future policies. 

This was a fantastic opportunity for the ResBios partners and the wider research community to discuss some of the key outcomes of the ResBios project as well as reflect on the future of Responsible Research and Innovation within the fields of biosciences.

The conference was a success and we heard lots of different perspectives from stakeholders within research, civil society, industry, and governance to help ensure that the positive momentum the ResBios project has made in instilling positive changes in the biosciences community is continued.

Featuring contributions from Wiebe Bijker – the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Luciano d’Andrea – Knowledge & Innovation Srls, Georgios Papanagnou – European Commission, DG RTD, and Ingeborg Meijer- Leiden University,  Mónica Bettencourt-Dias the EU-LIFE project, and Stefan Philipp– Zentrum für Soziale Innovation, plus many others! We were also lucky enough to have René von Schomberg in attendance, one of the key figures in creating the RRI framework.

We also used this opportunity to share the new ResBios Manifesto for the Transformation of Science-Society Relations and the launch of the International Network for Responsible Biosciences, which we will go into more detail later in the newsletter. 

Over the past few weeks, we spent a little time chatting with some of our ResBios implementing partners about their experiences, the successes they achieved, and also some of the challenges faced along the way. 

Check out the playlist below to hear from Toni Safner from the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Agriculture in Croatia, Janire Salazar from the Institut de Ciències del Mar, Spanish National Research Council in Spain, and Aglaia Pappa and Alex Galanis from the Democritus University of Thrace, Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics in Greece.

Click here to watch the interviews.

Or you can learn more about our partners from the Ivan Franco University of Lviv and their experience in this article about their final general assembly, where they presented their findings to local stakeholders from Ukraine. 

Responsibility is a concept increasingly used to refer to the ethical aspect of doing research and innovation.  In this Manifesto, responsibility is elaborated as a concept broader in scope and impact, i.e. as a concept to guide institutional practices for better managing current transformations in science and science-society relationships.

This Manifesto is one of the end products of the ResBios project, which was aimed at further developing and embedding practices of responsible research and innovation (RRI) in bioscience organisations, and was written in partnership with our ResBios advisors.
 

Click here to read the full manifesto!

We are very pleased to announce the launch of our new network

At the ResBios final conference on December 7th, the consortium was very pleased to announce the launch of the International Network for Responsible Biosciences. This is an online network that aims to build upon the success of the ResBios project and to create a community of researchers, project coordinators, science communicators, etc, interested in promoting responsible practice in biosciences, through mutual learning and knowledge sharing. 

The ResBios consortium will act as the core team for this network and will provide the framework for many of the earlier training materials, events, and communications. But as the network grows it is the hope of the INRB that other members will start to contribute more, and from this, a community will grow! 

To learn more or to join the network click here.