Renan Gonçalves Leonel da Silva is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Health Ethics and Policy Lab, Institute for Translational Medicine, Department of Health Sciences and Technology, ETH Zürich, Switzerland. He is affiliated with the National Centre of Competence in Research – Molecular Systems Engineering, Switzerland.

Your research examines how scientists and technology developers share practices, norms, and beliefs in molecular engineering research and synthetic biology-related domains. How do you position your research in science and technology studies? 

My work is sustained by two well-known STS fields of expertise. It is based on the intersection of the sociology of the life sciences, and the studies on science, technology and innovation in healthcare and biomedicine. Combining these approaches allows me to understand the ongoing configuration of the knowledge infrastructures and regimes of knowledge production in the so-called “molecular systems engineering” field. My current research deals with the organization and technical transformations of the research and development on new molecular engineered healthcare technologies, and its interface with society and science policy. With my background in STS, I am able to investigate the material and intellectual platforms of molecular engineering technologies culturally and historically, as well as ethical issues raised by the clinical applications of those complex biotechnologies.

In this process, and still speaking generally, I am particularly interested in how governance regimes and technical infrastructures reallocate social groups, institutions, and behaviours in the daily research activities on molecular systems engineering, and how this research agenda could become more transparent and participatory with society. Likewise, I’ve been learning a lot about the exchange of cultural and epistemic rationales behind the dialogue amidst molecular systems engineering and biomedical innovation over the last few years. This is what I like the most, as well as the shaping and translation of breakthrough healthcare technologies into feasible clinical applications.

My trajectory in STS has been firmly focused on the sociological meanings that the term “molecular” carry into the making of research agendas in science and technology. I encountered a fruitful academic landscape in STS to study the molecular entity as a technological and political phenomenon. I’ve been exposed to this field since the early days of my Ph.D. in Science and Technology Policy Studies in the Department of Science and Technology Policy of the State University of Campinas, Brazil. My thesis addressed the transformations of the technical and political infrastructures of Brazilian cancer research from the 1970s to the 2010s. My work focused on the role of science and technology policies and the local bandwagon of public health stakeholders to shape the transition to the Molecular Oncology research agenda in the state of São Paulo, Brazil.

After my Ph.D., I studied the role of public policies in advancing the research and manufacturing of the so-called therapeutic monoclonal antibodies in Brazil. I worked with interdisciplinary STS approaches on biomedicine and healthcare in the Faculty of Medicine of the University of São Paulo, where I acquired a background on the complex relationship between science and technology policies, healthcare systems, and the biopharmaceutical industry. Currently, I am in my second post-doc in the Health Ethics and Policy Lab of the Institute of Translational Medicine of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland.

You recently finished the project Viral Agnotology: Covid-19 Denialism amidst the pandemic in Brazil, the United Kingdom and the United States. Why did you choose a comparative perspective, and what benefits may this involve?

In 2020-2021, projects comparing Covid-19 responses became a big deal in STS-related fields. Great projects have been done mainly in the United States and Europe, comparing the management of knowledge infrastructures to mitigate the negative impact of the pandemic worldwide. Then, my colleague Larry Au (now Assistant Professor at CUNY) and I decided to explore the immaterial side of this debate, supported as awardees of the Rapid-Response Grant on Covid-19 and the Social Sciences of the Social Sciences Research Council of New York (SSRC).

Our project resulted in a paper titled “Blind spots of sociotechnical imaginaries: Covid-19 skepticism in Brazil, United Kingdom, and United States”. We compared agendas of co-production of imaginaries of SARS-CoV-2 infections, public health infrastructures, and public scepticism in the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic (between January and June 2020). We crossed data from over 40k newspaper articles in the nine top newspapers in those countries (available online) and played with the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries to advance the idea of blind spots in those collective sociological phenomena.

The great thing about this work was exercising our STS theories “in the middle of the hurricane”, trying to define, in real-time, what kind of discourses, references and materiality would better illustrate the public understanding of the pandemic in each country. It was an opportunity to study the cultural and technical pathways through which each society builds distrust and scepticism in experts and policymakers. It was a good thing to remind us about the importance of criticising “pop” STS theoretical frames and rethinking the importance of doing social science more quickly to inform the public debate amidst the chaos of information.

To what extent do you use digital media to circulate your research?

I am working to improve this side of my professional life in academia. It is a skill that all careers must be good at nowadays. But to be honest, it took some time until I noticed its importance. It was only recently that I became more active on social media, i.e., Twitter, LinkedIn and ResearchGate (from 2019 afterwards). I appreciate that STS is still a little world where is reaching some colleagues through those platforms is easy. The research on Covid-19 described above has been a gamechanger in this sense. It provoked me to the sociological debate on the intrinsic relationship between politics, expert knowledge, and society during my days in quarantine in 2020 and beyond. Social media went from an accessorial tool to an indispensable resource of academia. We ended up sharing the results of this research as a guest on podcasts, radio interviews, local TV shows, commentaries on newspapers, blog posts, and interviews with science magazines.

Are you currently planning any new research projects?

Well, my time has been split between two main activities. Fistful, and together with my colleagues Professor Effy Vayena and Alessandro Blasimme, we are deeply involved with a project on ethical and regulatory questions related to engineered molecular systems as part of our attributions in the National Centre of Competence in Research – Molecular Systems Engineering (NCCR-MSE) funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). We aim to use this unique opportunity to strengthen the field of STS at the ETH Zürich and in Switzerland. There are great advantages of doing STS in a department of Health Sciences of an Institute of Technology – we can interact as “insiders” of a dynamic agenda of biological and biomedical engineering innovation, healthcare technology development, and clinical troubles. In the Health Ethics and Policy Lab, I have the privilege to advance STS in a top-ranked centre of Bioethics in Europe, where I am surrounded by an interdisciplinary team of creative researchers working on STS-related topics.

Also, we are working on collaborations towards a deeper understanding of the co-production, convergence, and change of knowledge infrastructures in molecular systems engineering and advanced therapy medicinal products. Our centre is part of the Institute of Translational Medicine of the Department of Health Sciences and Technology (D-HEST), which provides a productive environment to explore the pathways empirically from science to healthcare technologies.

You organized a workshop on “Molecular Engineering, Biomedicine and Society” this summer. Which themes did it cover? Who participated?

We recently organized the NCCR-MSE Workshop on Molecular engineering, Biomedicine and Society, which happened at the ETH Zürich on June 13, 2022. It was a one-day event funded by the Institute of Translational Medicine of ETH Zürich and the Swiss National Science Foundation. The workshop was a great opportunity to debate the emerging trends of molecular engineering technologies and ongoing biomedical applications. We advanced the characterization of the epistemic configuration and process of knowledge convergence in the field, and analyzed the emerging societal challenges behind the concept of engineered molecular systems. We invited ten people from STS, material scientists, researchers in molecular engineering technologies, historians of sciences and engineering, science communication, synthetic biologists, physical chemists, biomedical engineers, bioethicists, and policymakers. We invite you to check our website, where you can access all the panels and sections. Details about the workshop are available here.