Q & A with Michael Burgess, University of British Columbia (UBC) professor, Chair in Biomedical Ethics, and Principal of UBC's College for Interdisciplinary Studies

Michael Burgess is comfortable being at the intersection. His office, situated at the northwest edge of the UBC campus, looks out onto a dense stand of Douglas-firs and Western Red Cedars. Way, way up – at tree-top level – sit several bulky Great Blue Heron nests.

"Every once in a while, as I sit at my desk, I hear a great big shriek and suddenly a whole bunch of adult herons take off", says Burgess. "It's quite a sight."

This juxtaposition of the bricks-and-mortar world of academics and the natural world of the heronry can be viewed as a bit of a metaphor for Michael Burgess' career – much of which has focused on interdisciplinary collaboration at the intersection of science and society.

A long-time UBC professor, Burgess is Chair in Biomedical Ethics – both at UBC's Centre for Applied Ethics (CAE) and in the Department of Medical Genetics. Two years ago, he was also appointed Principal of UBC's College for Interdisciplinary Studies, which is made up of internationally respected centres, institutes, and graduate programs. Burgess' role includes working with "academic teams to stimulate collaborative interdisciplinary-oriented activities across campus and in the wider community".

Impact met with Burgess at his UBC office.

In your current role as Principal of UBC's College for Interdisciplinary Studies, you clearly understand and can appreciate the importance of learning from multiple perspectives and transcending disciplinary barriers to adequately address some of the most critical issues facing society. You have also worked as a GE³LS researcher for some time in your own particular field of expertise. In simple terms, how would you describe the "Making of a GE³LS researcher"?

Social science and humanities researchers often want to make a difference, to create a better world. They want to improve situations by studying them. They gravitate towards GE³LS research, in particular, because their interests include genetics and genomics, and the impact of these on society. They're also drawn to the research area by funding mechanisms that give them an opportunity to develop collaborative projects, while also allowing them to pursue their own academic goals.

GE³LS researchers step into new territories. They have to have a good enough understanding of genomics, and a willingness to have multiple academic audiences. They have to integrate their work across disciplines, while also being sufficiently reflective and rigorous in their own discipline – otherwise they risk being considered superficial.

What do you think has been the greatest contribution of GE³LS researchers within the past 10 years, nationally and internationally?

Nationally, I'd say capacity-building in the sense of developing students and researchers who can extend collaborations and GE³LS research well beyond any discrete policy or research deliverables. Stand-alone GE³LS projects have allowed research centres and academic departments to develop GE³LS as a field of study, rich in diverse approaches, epistemologies, methods and topics. Entire centres had significant portions of their research and graduate training focused on GE³LS through large-scale funding, which in turn, provided an academic home for those participating in many smaller integrated projects. This has enabled institutions to increase capacity for GE³LS integration and generate future GE³LS researchers.

Because of this, Canada has built a GE³LS research platform which is the envy of most people who do GE³LS-type research around the world. Genome Canada took a bold step with its GE³LS program: by allowing stand-alone GE³LS projects to be eligible for large-scale funding, and by requiring integration of GE³LS aspects in all large-scale science projects, it went beyond the EU, and in contrast to many US approaches, has experimented with more interdisciplinary, collaborative arrangements for advancing science.

What do you think are the greatest practical challenges facing researchers who'd be genuinely interested in tackling these GE³LS issues?

A first challenge is related to funding. In the absence of funding for large-scale stand-alone GE³LS projects, sustained capacity development, rigor of GE³LS research, and good translation to appropriate policy and other uptakes are all jeopardized.

The lack of large-scale GE³LS project funding would drive faculty researchers to other fields to find research funding of adequate scale and scope to support their research and graduate students. This would reverse important gains made by the core programmatic approach to GE³LS research that large-scale funding in Canada has stimulated.

Without an academic home in a graduate program or a stand-alone project, integrated projects are less subject to ongoing peer review from within appropriate GE³LS disciplines, which is critical for fostering collaborative approaches that are truly interdisciplinary and sufficiently rigorous. Without the benefit of a well-grounded GE³LS team, integrated GE³LS research risks becoming focused on the scientific components of the project, isolated from their peers in GE³LS-related disciplines and disconnected from the broader GE³LS issues and opportunities.

Another challenge is how we measure the impact of GE³LS research. Some of the measures traditionally used for evaluating the impact of science may be insufficient (e.g., number of publications) or inapplicable (e.g., number of patents). Other suggested measures may be superficial and inappropriate. For example, social scientists are sometimes asked, "Which policy cites your work?", when our impact is often not that direct, nor should it be.

How would you go about developing the next generation of GE³LS leaders in Canada and equipping them with the knowledge, skills and experience needed to overcome these challenges?

The ideal would be to provide infrastructure funding to develop connections between GE³LS relevant disciplines and genome sciences and technology programs. NSERC CREATE programs may be one way to do this, but it is difficult to do more than a token amount of social sciences and humanities in relation to science. Stand-alone GE³LS project funding and/or clusters of integrated projects funded by Genome Canada have built these connections through informal collaborations, including the growth of personal relationships necessary to collaborate on GE³LS. We need to find a way to sustain these collaborations through more support for GE³LS training, development of approaches and their assessment.

While GE³LS researchers can follow very different career paths, have a very broad range of perspectives and may use varying research approaches and methods, what do you think are some of the key unifying features which attract GE³LS researchers to work in the same GE³LS space?

There is no defined area of scholarship that corresponds to GE³LS. It is a diverse aggregate of various forms of research, typically collaborative, some overlapping in methods and topics. Sometimes, integration within the legal, social science and humanities components is more challenging than GE³LS-science integration. But if you look for common features among GE³LS researchers, you will find a tendency toward problem-focused research and collaboration. Rather than seeking to extend a well-established method or theory, many GE³LS and interdisciplinary science researchers identify a problem that is important for society, but cannot be easily resolved using a single disciplinary approach. Most are comfortable with redefining the problem based on input of different perspectives – often that of other disciplines but sometimes that of various publics who have special experience or articulate wider perceptions from outside the academy.

There are different ways of working out problems. Some GE³LS researchers are more interested in looking at problems from a conceptual standpoint. For example, they might look at how science is located historically or how the issues change over time. Others have a more practical orientation – for example, applied ethics. In both cases, GE³LS researchers tend to propose novel approaches or synthesize approaches that often incorporate different perspectives – some of which may actually conflict with one another. The conflict may be methodological, political or epistemological. But the best of these researchers tolerate the ambiguity and do not let pressure to settle the practical issues, or demonstrate "results" impede their articulation of the uncertainties and controversies.

Typically, they all have some experience with collaboration, or at least a willingness to try. And as you can imagine, these researchers and teams have interesting career trajectories.

What do you think will be the defining GE³LS issues and opportunities over the next decade?

I'm not good at predicting and I probably have a better chance at being wrong. But, generally, I have a hope that genome and GE³LS research will lead to knowledge and applications that are widely available, and governed in a manner that is trustworthy to diverse publics and proportionate to risks and benefits.

I think that GE³LS research defined by issues or topics will be far less important than that which emphasizes the development of systematic, theoretically-informed and rigorously-assessed approaches to types of problems. GE³LS is not a collection of topics but a creative synthesis across academic and non-academic knowledge that cannot be done well without a critical mass of colleagues working together to refine their approaches.

With that in mind, I think the most important issue is designing approaches to deliberatively engaging diverse publics and appropriately incorporating what we learn into trustworthy, dynamic and proportionate governance. I have colleagues who are working on what they think are the most important issues, including: enhanced science-community dialogue; better IP regimes; technology development in collaboration with developing countries; improved innovation pathways; and addressing researcher culture and structural barriers to translation of knowledge. All of these seem to contribute to the hope that genome-related science and technology can be widely beneficial and that its governance is both trustworthy and proportionate.