Research Policy As Industry Policy: Reconfiguring Scientific and Social Value(s) in Australian Medical Research

• In Event: Trans-organisational Collaboration in Different Sectors: Epistemic Values and the Dynamics of Co-production

Abstract

State-backed efforts to promote biomedical innovation frequently tout hopes for both improved health outcomes and opportunities for wealth creation. Yet the implications of the growing emphasis on industrial development aims within health and medical research policy remain comparatively unexamined. We argue that notions of social value in health policy, and of the criteria by which scientific merit should be judged, are being profoundly reconfigured as health and medical research is recast as innovation science.

The paper explores the transformation of metrics of scientific and social value in the recent introduction of a major new research policy and funding instrument adopted by the Australian Federal Government, the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF). We appraise key attributes of the policy and of the debate that surrounded its introduction, paying close attention to the enactment of value(s) that both effect. We conclude that the MRFF treats industrial development itself as a public good, while foregrounding commercial potential in the evaluation of research merit.

STS has long observed that the epistemic authority of science is achieved in large part by its performance as “disinterested” and “stand[ing] apart from the contaminating touch of politics” (Jasanoff 2005). Somewhat differently, as biomedicine is hailed as an engine of innovation, we note political actors and research sector champions alike emphasising its social value, commercial necessity, and political responsiveness. The engagement by medical science in sociopolitical promising that requires demonstration of its own hybridisation offers an intriguing new site for theorising processes of co-production.

Authors

• Georgia Miller, UNSW

• Matthew Kearnes, Environmental Humanities Progarmme, School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wale

• Declan Liam Kuch, UNSW