Responsible Biosciences — A Manifesto for the Transformation of Science-Society Relations

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. These transformations are, at the same time, promising and risky. Responsibility, as presented in this Manifesto, allows for better balancing between sustainability and profitability, between goal-focused and curiosity-driven research, and between open science and market-driven science. Academic research and industrial research are now intimately intertwined, and one depends on the other now. Thus, responsibility does not only concern research institutions or universities but also involves a myriad of actors turning around research and innovation, including private companies. Though this Manifesto is relevant for all scientific and scholarly research, it primarily draws on experiences in the biosciences.

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.