Seeking Support for this Consortia
As we set out in our Lancet piece, every organisation operating within the field of genomics has the potential to either help or hinder its ability to deliver fair and equitable healthcare outcomes for all. Just one slip up by one organisation, one badly orchestrated public engagement, one misstep, or an ill-advised communication could set the whole realm of genomics back decades simply inflaming the distrust ordinary people already feel about genomic science, the scientists and their intentions.
To that end Only Human are seeking support from partners to build a consortia
The ask: support is offered into the project to operationalise it, fund the creative asset production and participate in (and gain from) the research.
The offer: everyone in the consortia can use the creative assets with their own audiences. All assets are free to download and use. We will co-ordinate the research and offer ethical oversight to the project, as well as build and share the evidence-based that we collectively gather. This will then be available and free for anyone working in the genomics world to use.
The result: together we build an evidence base for communication with broad public audiences around genomics. We create the conditions so that more publics and patients are aware of what genomics is, thus opening up conversations that allow such audiences to put forward their voices to impact policy and shape the delivery of research and clinical practice. If more public audiences feel they have a vested interest in the science, then they are in a stronger position to have an opinion about it. Ultimately this means collectively sharing a mitigation against a public backlash – well, an informed public backlash is perfectly acceptable! but a knee-jerk response based on a perception that ‘genomics’ is based on ‘gnomes and economics’ (yes we have heard this in our research) may do more harm than good to the entire industry of genomics. Together we rectify the historic societal imbalance that currently blights genetic research outcomes and healthcare outcomes more generally.
Please contact Professor Anna Middleton if you want to join our consortia: kavlicentre@educ.cam.ac.uk