User:Shawndouglas/sandbox/sublevel12

Discussion and closing remarks

Discussion

In truth, researching and writing this guide has been a challenge because few have put the disparate pieces together. Instead, a review of journal articles, books, and news items revealed:

material written from a technical, regulatory, and methodological perspective, with little to none from the sociological and anthropological perspective;
material that takes a focused, analytical approach to laboratory activities and not so much a broader, human interest approach to those activities; and
material that simply glosses over or fails to mention the relevance of laboratories to manufacturing, research and development (R&D), and analytical activities.

As such, it doesn't take much effort to reach a perhaps inconclusive belief that today the laboratory setting and its researchers are so interwoven into the fabric of our society — largely behind the scenes — that the average person is practically blind to them and their impact on their day-to-day life. That's not to say, however, that the impact of research laboratories on the social structure hasn't ever been discussed; rather, it's not discussed often. But it is happening. In June 2014 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published the report The Impacts of Large Research Infrastructures on Economic Innovation and on Society: Case Studies at CERN to show "the ways in which the outcomes of publicly-funded research can benefit national economies and can affect the lives of citizens in general."^[1] This came from CERN leaders themselves, who wanted a third party to analyze the laboratory's impact on the society and economy. In that paper, the authors emphasize the difficulty of that task^[1]:

Long-term impacts [of the activities of a laboratory] on science, the economy and society are, typically, difficult to forecast and to assess. They can even be difficult to evaluate retrospectively, since science typically advances over a broad front, with many separate but interlinked discoveries producing overall societal change. The impact of any particular scientific result is hard to separate cleanly from that of many others. In addition, it is widely acknowledged that scientific and technological progress are closely intertwined, such that certain fundamental problems cannot be tackled unless technology (even commercial technology) is sufficiently advanced. Scientists who undertake basic research may not be motivated by a desire to achieve concrete societal benefits. In some cases the emergence of benefits is a long-term and highly indirect process, such as when advances in understanding provoke a "scientific crisis" that then becomes a driver for breakthrough discoveries ...

These are all important points worth noting when thinking about how laboratories affect our lives. Quantifying and qualifying is how most seek answers and rationalize their world, but doing such with laboratories and their activities is apparently a difficult task indeed. This may lend to the lack of research on laboratories and how they affect societies.

In a less obvious example, the American Association for the Advancement of Science has been promoting science and research advocacy through its workshops^[2]^[3], including encouraging scientists to more clearly and succinctly demonstrate the social and cultural implications of their laboratory research to lawmakers. Their thinking is essentially by making laboratory research more relatable to society and human outcomes, it will be less difficult to acquire research funding.