Collegiate Times

In 2003, Crist wrote in Wild Earth that the loss of half the Earth's species might not be disastrous for humans, but would result in the loss of uninvestigated medicines, products and food sources.

"The crucial question is not whether a world with less variety and richness is viable, but rather, who would want to live in such a world?" Crist said.

STS trains students to work in both of those communities and between them, acting as a type of interpreter.

"The problem for the field is that you have people trained in some environment who don't know that what they need is someone who can mediate between technical and nontechnical fields - so you don't have recruiters coming from corporations, nonprofits or government saying, 'We need STS people to help mediate our technical people and our nontechnical people,'" Downey said.

This lack of understanding leaves STS graduates to have to make their own case.

"STS people have to sell themselves, they have to compete for positions in nonacademic environments by demonstrating we have a capability from which you would benefit," Downey said.

Downey said students leaving the STS program enter academia, public policy groups, nonprofits and private industry.

"People who come out of this graduate program are very good at interacting with people across the whole range of capabilities and competencies; they're good at talking to technical people about technical stuff and non-technical people about non-technical stuff," Downey said.

The end result is someone ready to work in both the technical and non-technical fields of these overlapping worlds and address their problems.

"I say that these people lead, because through work in STS one becomes - in a way - triply schizophrenic: through historical work involving the emergence of some technical issue, through philosophical work and social or cultural or political science they understand the non-technical dimensions of that issue," Downey said.

That leadership has netted results in the past, as scholarly concern has caused scientists to reevaluate ongoing research. One such example was research into genetic recombination, which was halted for two years while scientists evaluated the state of the research and its ethical implications, Zallen said.

"They knew there was some great value from studying recombination, from putting genes from one organism inside another to study that gene," Zallen said. "They also knew they needed to examine the possible implications."

Continue Reading:  « Previous123