Poster #132 - Ethics as Leverage: How States Shape Moral Boundaries in Biomedicine

• In Event: Saturday Poster Luncheon

Abstract

Why do states repeatedly select certain scientific fields as sites of intensive policy intervention, and how does policy shape, rather than merely regulate, the moral boundaries of innovation? This paper addresses these questions by re-examining a series of high-profile controversies in biomedicine. Cases such as Sweden’s regenerative medicine crisis, South Korea’s stem cell fraud, and China’s gene-editing incident are frequently interpreted as instances of individual misconduct or regulatory breakdown. Yet this framing obscures a deeper and more persistent pattern in the political organization of scientific advancement. Drawing on comparative qualitative analysis, this study examines why governments consistently prioritize scientific fields marked by high uncertainty and ethical indeterminacy, and how policy operates as an active force in shaping acceptable risk rather than functioning solely as an external constraint. Across the cases of Sweden’s Macchiarini affair, South Korea’s Hwang Woo-suk case, and China’s He Jiankui incident, biomedicine emerges as a particularly strategic domain for state intervention. Its unresolved ethical boundaries create opportunities for governments to accelerate innovation, project scientific leadership, and distinguish national governance pathways without relying exclusively on long-term scientific capacity building. Through process tracing and policy discourse analysis, the study traces how strategic funding priorities, regulatory ambiguity, and exception-based governance mechanisms interact over time. In each case, periods of anticipated scientific breakthrough are accompanied by the normalization of extreme risk-taking, often justified through narratives of urgency, medical necessity, or global competition. Accountability, by contrast, tends to be deferred, becoming fully articulated only once controversy escalates into public crisis. Despite differences in political systems and institutional arrangements, these cases reveal a shared governance logic that cuts across national contexts. Taken together, the findings suggest that ethical controversy in biomedicine should not be understood solely as evidence of policy failure. Rather, such controversies often arise as predictable outcomes of success-oriented science policy, in which moral indeterminacy functions as a form of policy leverage. Ethical ambiguity in certain biotechnological domains is not simply tolerated due to governance gaps; it is frequently embedded within policy design itself, enabling flexible boundary-making during critical phases of innovation.By foregrounding the strategic role of ethical boundary construction, this analysis raises a broader normative question: to what extent do states claim the authority to redefine moral boundaries in exchange for scientific advancement and national interest? In addressing this question, the paper contributes to ongoing debates on science and innovation policy, the governance of emerging technologies, and the political construction of ethics.

Author

• Yizhe Wang, Georgia Institute of Technology
  Presenting Author