Oxford Martin School: Public Lectures and Seminars

What is science for, what good does it do and should it do good? In this lecture, Sulston and Harris will attempt to identify some of the most urgent ethical and regulatory problems raised by contemporary science, and suggest some possible solutions. They will discuss some key cutting edge scientific problems, and debate how we can assess their impact. Where do the significant ethical and regulatory dilemmas for science lie? Are we worrying about the right things? They will also address the crucial issue of international or "global" co-ordination at the level of regulation. What happens when research is illegal - criminalised in some jurisdictions and permitted in others or when products or services are freely available in some countries and denied to the citizens of others? Is harmonization necessary or can we live with a plurality of regulatory environments? Finally, they will raise the question of who owns science. They will suggest that scientific co-operation - the freedom of science to operate across frontiers, regulatory boundaries and share information freely between scientists and institutions - carries with it certain responsibilities. They will argue that equity and morality require open access and benefit sharing. And they will suggest what such benefit sharing might amount to. Professor Sir John Sulston is a Nobel Prize winner and Chair of the University of Manchester's Institute of Science, Ethics and Innovation, a new research institute focusing on the ethical questions raised by science and technology in the 21st century. Professor John Harris is the Lord David Alliance Professor of Bioethics, and research director at the University of Manchester's Institute of Science, Ethics and Innovation. Professor Richard Dawkins is Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford.

The global financial crisis reflects a failure of global economic governance. The failure of America's regulatory system has not only ramifications for the American economy, but for the global economy. It is clear that the banks' risk management systems could not even protect their own shareholders, let alone the well-being of the global economy. What went wrong? Where did the global financial regulators fail? What can we do to minimize the downturn? And what, if anything, can we do to prevent a recurrence? What are the lessons for global governance in the 21st Century? Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University in New York and Chair of Columbia University's Committee on Global Thought. He is also the co-founder and Executive Director of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information. Stiglitz helped create a new branch of economics, "The Economics of Information," exploring the consequences of information asymmetries and pioneering such pivotal concepts as adverse selection and moral hazard, which have now become standard tools not only of theorists, but of policy analysts. His work has helped explain the circumstances in which markets do not work well, and how selective government intervention can improve their performance. Recognized around the world as a leading economic educator, he has written textbooks that have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He founded one of the leading economics journals, The Journal of Economic Perspectives. His book, Globalization and Its Discontents, (W.W. Norton June 2001) has been translated into 35 languages and has sold more than one million copies worldwide. Most recently, he has written The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict with Linda J. Bilmes, published by WW Norton in March 2008.

In the second of the Distinguished Public Lecture Series run by the James Martin 21st Century School, Dr Craig Venter will discuss his work at the J Craig Venter Institute and its implications for the future of our culture, society and science. The Institute's projects include developing new understanding of human disease at the DNA level, running the Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling Expedition to understand microbial diversity in the world's oceans, and finding new ways of tackling environmental issues, especially the production of new biological sources of energy. One of its many goals is to engineer microbes that can produce biological sources of fuel. Dr Venter and his team believe that genomics is the field of science that has the power to transform the world around us.

Professor Sir Nicholas Stern, HM Treasury: The economics of climate change Introduced by: Dr John Hood, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford. Chaired by: Dr Ian Goldin, Director of the James Martin 21st Century School.