A NEW SOCIAL CONTRACT

Toward precision medicine: a new social contract?

earlier this year, illumina inc. and life technologies inc. each announced new products that can sequence a genome for $1,000 in a single day (1); approximately 3 million times cheaper than the cost during the Human Genome Project back in the early part of the last decade. Furthermore, cloud-based, big-data software companies are capable of using whole-and partial-genome sequencing to automate ...

Creating ‘Science’s New Social Contract’?

In this paper we shall give a background to some of the main theoretical literature on the subject of what has been called (by Gibbons) “science’s new social contract with society”; central to this new contract is what is called “Mode-2 knowledge production” (Nowotny) characterised by the more open approach of transdisciplinarity allied to an extended peer review. Mode-2 knowledge production al...

Agency, Cyberspace, and Social Contract

The social contract has been about rights and responsibilities in human societies. Facebook and its role in manufacturing and sustaining a global social contract, a new “we” is clearly one of the research areas that needs more attention. A new “we” is coming of age in the new age of connectivity and communication with a new outlook toward responsibility and rights at individual and collective l...

Research led by participants: a new social contract for a new kind of research

In recent years, there have been prominent calls for a new social contract that accords a more central role to citizens in health research. Typically, this has been understood as citizens and patients having a greater voice and role within the standard research enterprise. Beyond this, however, it is important that the renegotiated contract specifically addresses the oversight of a new, path-br...

The Revolutionary New Woman: Renegotiating her Social Contract through Sex