Introduction
Introduction—Grand Challenges and small steps

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Highlights

  • Research practices demanded by Grand Challenges raise philosophical questions.

  • Grand Challenges require knowledge integration and its translation in practice.

  • We summarize the main arguments and theses of the essays collected.

  • Constructive modesty is a flexible, modular approach to transdisciplinary theory.

  • Devolutionist strategies for integration demand further work on responsible research.

Abstract

This collection addresses two different audiences: 1) historians and philosophers of the life sciences reflecting on collaborations across disciplines, especially as regards defining and addressing Grand Challenges; 2) researchers and other stakeholders involved in cross-disciplinary collaborations aimed at tackling Grand Challenges in the life and medical sciences. The essays collected here offer ideas and resources both for the study and for the practice of goal-driven cross-disciplinary research in the life and medical sciences. We organise this introduction in three sections. The first section provides some background and context. The second motivates our take on this topic and then outlines the central ideas of each paper. The third section highlights the specificity and significance of this approach by considering: a) how this collection departs from existing literature on inter- and trans-disciplinarity, b) what is characteristic about this approach, and c) what role this suggests for the history and philosophy of the life sciences in addressing Grand Challenges.

Section snippets

Why should historians and philosophers of biology and biomedicine care about Grand Challenges?

Readers of this journal have already been introduced to the challenge of integration in the life sciences by a special issue which appeared in 2013 (vol. 44, issue 4, part A). While that issue focused mainly on integration within the biological and biomedical sciences, the present issue focuses primarily on integration with other disciplines and with stakeholders outside academia. The previous special issue was mainly an answer to the transformations effected on the biological sciences by the

Two hurdles for cross-disciplinary work on Grand Challenges: translation and integration

The contributions in this volume suggest that working successfully across scientific disciplines, public sectors and civil society on socially relevant issues can itself be a Grand Challenge. The first challenge is how to address problems that arise in ‘wild’, uncontrolled environments in systematic and principled ways. Grand Challenges may resist neat causal analysis because they are neither isolated, nor static, and furthermore they are altered by human interventions, which in turn are

How does this collection add to existing literature?

Let us first consider the existing literature on interdisciplinarity especially as concerns the life and medical sciences. Literature on interdisciplinarity can usefully—if a little schematically—be divided into two main strands: the first offering visions of interdisciplinary futures based on emerging trends and perceived knowledge needs of society (e.g. Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1993, Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1994, Jantsch, 1972, Gibbons et al., 1994, Klein et al., 2001, Nowotny et al., 2001), and

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the contributors to this collection—including Julie Thompson Klein and Bob Frodeman—for their supportive feedback and insightful and meticulous work on this collection. We would like to especially thank Evelyn Brister for helpful suggestions that we have incorporated in the final version of this introduction. We give heartfelt thanks to Bjørn Kåre Myskja and the NTNU RESET group for their continued support for this project despite the taxing resources of research time

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    The editors are joint first editors and listed alphabetically; both contributed in equal measure to the completion of this collection.

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