Building a responsible innovation toolkit as project legacy.

This article explores whether and in what way it is possible to employ toolkits for responsible research and innovation (RRI toolkits) as mechanisms for ensuring the legacy of RRI in research projects. Based on a review of the concept of responsible research and innovation as well as existing toolkits in the area, the article offers an account of the development of an RRI toolkit in the context of the EU- funded Human Brain Project. This toolkit is designed to integrate insights and practices of responsible research and innovation developed over a 10 year period into the project legacy, the EBRAINS research infrastructure. The article suggests that toolkits have the potential to contribute to ensuring a long- lasting legacy of work undertaken in responsible research and innovation, but that this potential requires further support from institutions and the broader research environment to become realized.

Linking Brain Structure, Activity, and Cognitive Function through Computation.

Understanding the human brain is a "Grand Challenge" for 21st century research. Computational approaches enable large and complex datasets to be addressed efficiently, supported by artificial neural networks, modeling and simulation. Dynamic generative multiscale models, which enable the investigation of causation across scales and are guided by principles and theories of brain function, are instrumental for linking brain structure and function. An example of a resource enabling such an integrated approach to neuroscientific discovery is the BigBrain, which spatially anchors tissue models and data across different scales and ensures that multiscale models are supported by the data, making the bridge to both basic neuroscience and medicine. Research at the intersection of neuroscience, computing and robotics has the potential to advance neuro-inspired technologies by taking advantage of a growing body of insights into perception, plasticity and learning. To render data, tools and methods, theories, basic principles and concepts interoperable, the Human Brain Project (HBP) has launched EBRAINS, a digital neuroscience research infrastructure, which brings together a transdisciplinary community of researchers united by the quest to understand the brain, with fascinating insights and perspectives for societal benefits.

The innovation journey of genomics and asthma research.

This article concerns the transformative potential of medical genomics for common disease research. We analysed 13 review articles in asthma research in the period 1999 to 2008. Our aim was to understand how genomics has emerged in this research field, and the attendant changes. Motivated by Lippman's geneticisation thesis, we use the concept of an 'innovation journey' to trace how expectations of improved understanding, prevention, diagnosis and treatment structure a dynamic co-evolutionary process through which a genome-based discourse emerges. We show how the asthma researchers involved continuously struggle to define their contribution to asthma research, as well as to clinical practice. Along the way, the researchers propose changes to both the definition and the aetiological model of asthma, thus highlighting gene-gene and gene-environment interactions. It is, however, difficult to characterise this discourse as one of geneticisation. With increasing attention being given to epigenetics, metabolomics, proteomics and systems biology, the emerging picture suggests an important, but much less deterministic, role for genes.