TY - JOUR
T1 - Argumentative practices in science, technology and innovation policy
T2 - The case of clinician-scientists and translational research
AU - Vignola-Gagné, Etienne
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the ELSA-GEN joint programme of the Academy of Finland, the German Ministry of Science and Research and the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, Germany, as well as by a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant number 752-2010-0667).
Funding Information:
Recent health and biomedical innovation policies from the Federal Government of Germany, whose elaboration have been mostly led by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) (transl: Ministry of Education and Research), have addressed the issue of research conducted by clinicians along the lines first elaborated by the Wissenschaftsrat. Picking up on the problematic elaborated by clinician-scientists, the BMBF’s recent Health Research Framework Programme reiterates the need for better opportunities for scientific training and to conduct translational research within the network of German academic medicine centres:
Funding Information:
In Germany, funding and advisory agencies such as the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) (transl: German Research Foundation)) and the Wissenschaftsrat (transl: Council of Science and Humanities) have issued reports since the 1980s decrying a perceived poor state of clinical research and experimental medicine in Germany (Wissenschaftrat 1986, 2004; Deutsche Forschungsge-meinschaft 1999). These documents have argued that research activities are increasingly marginalised in German academic medicine. Unlike what could be observed in the USA, in Germany, policy-making for TR has been much more limited to the realm of setting priorities and proposing visions for future research agendas. No active management of institutional reform can be witnessed, as in the CTSA case. Nonetheless, these reports by the Wissenschaftsrat and the DFG have set the background against which further discussions of the state of clinician-scientists and the state of TR in Germany have been cast.
Funding Information:
The people that are doing basic science, they are threatened. Because they had a monopoly on NIH money. So they could go to the NIH and show very mechanistic research, very highly controlled, precisely controlled laboratory benchtop research and reviewers liked that. Translational research is messy. It’ll never look as good, you can’t control things very well. And you have to make a lot of compromises because it’s human subjects. So it’s much harder to get mechanistic and have proper controls and so forth. But no one can deny that you need to do it. So by giving it a name ... For a while there, it was looking pretty bleak. It was looking like you could never get funding from the NIH for this kind of work. (US-Investigator-1)
PY - 2014/2
Y1 - 2014/2
N2 - A growing number of studies of science, technology and innovation policy are taking argumentative practices as a privileged unit of analysis. Underpinning this development is the observation that, empirically, science, technology and innovation policies are often formulated and implemented through bargaining between competing coalitions of actors. I put this claim to practice by examining the recent emergence of translational research and translational medicine as central priority in the biomedical policy of the USA and Germany. Drawing on document analysis and semi-structured interviews with thirty-five biomedical researchers and policy-makers, I find that a specific group of actors, clinician-scientists, have successfully built a coalition concerned with increasing institutional support for their profession by claiming their role as privileged leaders of translational research initiatives. In doing so, they have simultaneously shaped the research agendas and institutional practices associated with translational research.
AB - A growing number of studies of science, technology and innovation policy are taking argumentative practices as a privileged unit of analysis. Underpinning this development is the observation that, empirically, science, technology and innovation policies are often formulated and implemented through bargaining between competing coalitions of actors. I put this claim to practice by examining the recent emergence of translational research and translational medicine as central priority in the biomedical policy of the USA and Germany. Drawing on document analysis and semi-structured interviews with thirty-five biomedical researchers and policy-makers, I find that a specific group of actors, clinician-scientists, have successfully built a coalition concerned with increasing institutional support for their profession by claiming their role as privileged leaders of translational research initiatives. In doing so, they have simultaneously shaped the research agendas and institutional practices associated with translational research.
KW - Argumentative policy analysis
KW - Biomedicine
KW - Clinician-scientists
KW - Innovation policy
KW - Translational medicine
KW - Translational research
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84897828792&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1093/scipol/sct039
DO - 10.1093/scipol/sct039
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84897828792
SN - 0302-3427
VL - 41
SP - 94
EP - 106
JO - Science and Public Policy
JF - Science and Public Policy
IS - 1
M1 - sct039
ER -