David Winickoff

Associate Professor of Bioethics and Society

Education

J.D.  Harvard Law School

B.A., M.A.  University of Cambridge, English

B.A.  Yale University, History

Research Description

I analyze the role of science and expertise in environmental law and politics, and explore biotechnology and medicine from an ethical, legal and social perspective. I write about questions of biological resources, property rights, and the commons; the role of expert communities in governing institutions; the politics of risk assessment; food safety standards; climate change and geoengineering. To do this, I draw questions and methods primarily from the fields of science and technology studies (STS), bioethics, and law. I am involved in policy work at state, Federal and international scales.

I am an Associate Director of the Berkeley Science, Technology and Society Center and serve on the Governing Council of the Science and Democracy Network. I am also a Greenwall Faculty Scholar in Bioethics.

Here is more detail on current streams of research:

1. Politics of Science in Environmental Governance

I work on the role of science, experts, and technical rationality within environmental law and governance across local and global scales. How does science and expertise operate in the formation and operation of resource management regimes and in environmental social movements? How can science be appropriately and effectively used to best govern resource use and motivate collective action? Work in this stream has focused on food standards, ecosystem management, climate change, and geoengineering.

2. Ethics and Governance of Biotechnology

Developments in the life sciences are driving fundamental changes in health care, agriculture, and energy systems. I analyze the imagination, emerging practices, and regulation of new biotechnologies from a socio-legal and normative perspective. In doing so, I seek to generate understandings of the larger patterns in the relation of science and society. Finally, I apply these understandings by developing new social architectures for these technologies in ethics, law, and politics. Work in this stream has focused on genomics, biobanks, GM food, patenting policies, stem cell research and the science commons.

3. Innovation and Justice

The process known as “innovation” occurs within an evolving network of universities, government agencies, scientists, foundations, industry, and venture capital. What are the effects of innovation systems on distribution of resources, technological divides, international development, and access to innovation? What are the accountability systems for public investment, e.g., for deciding what counts as “clean and green”? Furthermore, under the banner of promoting innovation, universities have become deeply embroiled in the ownership, transfer, and commercialization of its knowledge. Who is university-produced knowledge for, and what is the best way to share it? Currently I am focusing on university-industry partnerships, the scientific commons, alternative licensing provision to advance global public health, the mission of the contemporary research university, and the reciprocal obligations of science and the public.

Members of my lab work on the following:

• A comparison of biofuel innovation programs across Brazil and the U.S.
• The role of environmental impact assessment in major  environmental controversies in Chile
• Native American water sovereignty and the politics of indigenous knowledge
• Farm-to-hospital programs and the process of institutionalizing "sustainable food systems"
• The regulation of nanotechnology
• The rise of ecosystem services as a management paradigm, and its implications
• The history of fossil fuel systems in the United States.

Selected Publications

 

D.E. Winickoff, "The Evolving Contract: Biotechnology, Property, and the American University," in Science & Democracy: Making Knowledge and Making Power in the Biosciences and Beyond (Routledge) Forthcoming 2013.

David Winickoff, Preface to Science and Public Reason by Sheila Jasanoff (Routledge 2012), ix-xii.

Kayje M. Booker, Ashok J. Gadgil and David Winickoff, Engineering for the Global Poor: A Role for Intellectual Property? SCIENCE & PUBLIC POLICY. Advanced publication Fall 2012. doi:10.1093/scipol/scs049

K. O’Doherty, M. Burgess, K. Edwards, R. Gallagher, A. Hawkins, J. Kaye, V. McCaffrey, D.E. Winickoff, From Consent to Institutions: Designing Adaptive Governance for Genomic Biobanks, SOCIAL SCIENCE & MEDICINE 73(3): 367-374 (August 2011) Full text (protected) - Pre-publication version

K. Klein and D.E. Winickoff, Organic Regulation Across the Atlantic: Emergence, Divergence, Convergence, ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 20 (2): 153-172 (March 2011)

D. Matthews, G. Graff, K. Saha, D.E. Winickoff, Access to Stem Cells and Data: Persons, Property Rights, and Scientific Progress, SCIENCE 331 (6018): 725-727 (11 February 2011)

D.E. Winickoff, “Judicial Imaginaries of Technology: Constitutional Law and the DNA Round Up,” in Sheila Jasanoff (ed.), Reframing Rights: Bioconstitutionalism in the Genetics Age (MIT Press: Cambridge, 2011)

D.E. Winickoff and Kendra Klein, "Food Labels and the Environment: Towards Harmonization of EU and US Organic Standards" in David Vogel & Johan Swinnen (eds.), Transatlantic Regulatory Cooperation: The Shifting Roles of the EU, the US and California (Edward Elgar: Cheltenham, 2011)

J. Long and D.E. Winickoff, Governing Geoeingineering: Principles and Process, SOLUTIONS 1;5: 60-62 (October 2010)

S. O'Connor, G.D. Graff, and D.E. Winickoff, Legal Context of University Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer, peer-reviewed commissioned paper prepared for the National Academies of Science report, Managing University Intellectual Property in the Public Interest (2010)

D.E. Winickoff and Douglas Bushey, Science and Power in Global Food Regulation: The Rise of the Codex Alimentarius, 35 SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, & HUMAN VALUES 356-381 (2010).

D.E. Winickoff, “From Benefit Sharing to Power Sharing: Partnership Governance in Population Genomics Research,” pp.53-66 in J. Kaye, M. Stranger (eds.), Principles and Practice in Biobank Governance (Ashgate, 2009).

D.E. Winickoff, Gregory Graff and Kris Saha, Opening Stem Cell Research and Development: A Policy Proposal for the Management of Data, Intellectual Property, and Ethics, 9 YALE JOURNAL OF HEALTH LAW, POLICY & ETHICS 52-127 (2009)

D.E. Winickoff and O.K. Obasogie, Race-Specific Drugs: Regulatory Trends and Public Policy, 29 TRENDS IN PHARMACOLOGICAL SCIENCE 277-279 (June 2008)

D.E. Winickoff, Partnership in U.K. Biobank: A Third Way for Genomic Property?, J. LAW MEDICINE & ETHICS 35;3: 440-456 (Fall 2007)

D.E. Winickoff, Governing Stem Cell Research in California and the USA: Towards a Social Infrastructure, TRENDS IN BIOTECHNOLOGY 24;9: 390-394 (September 2006)

D.E. Winickoff, Genome and Nation: Iceland’s Health Sector Database and its Legacy, INNOVATIONS 1;2: 80-105 (Spring 2006)

D.E. Winickoff, L. Neumann, Towards a Social Contract for Genomics: Property and the Public in The ‘Biotrust’ Model , 1:3 GENOMICS, SOCIETY & POLICY 8-21 (December 2005)

D.E. Winickoff, et al.,Adjudicating the GM Food Wars: Science, Risk, and Democracy in World Trade Law , 30 YALE J. INTERNATIONAL LAW 81-123 (Winter 2005)

D.E. Winickoff, R. Winickoff, The Charitable Trust as a Model for Genomic Biobanks, NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE 349;12: 1180-1184 (18 September 2003)

D.E. Winickoff, Governing Population Genomics: Law, Bioethics, and Biopolitics in Three Case Studies, 43 JURIMETRICS 187-228 (2003)

Honors and Awards

• Visiting Professor - University of Trento, Italy - May 2011
• Young Faculty Award - College of Natural Resources, U.C. Berkeley - 2010
• Greenwall Foundation Faculty Scholar in Bioethics, 2007 - 2011
• Presidential Chair Fellowship - University of California, Berkeley - 2006
• Visiting Faculty Fellowship - Economic and Social Research Council- United Kingdom - 2006

Recent Teaching

• STS 200/ESPM C252: Topics in Science and Technology Studies
• LAW 271.71/ESPM 249: Bioethics, Law and the Life Sciences
• ESPM 162: Bioethics and Society
• ESPM 256: Science, Technology and the Politics of Nature
• ESPM 290: Technology | Nature | Culture
• ESPM 194: Capstone in Society and Environment

Research Interests Tags & Keywords: bioethics  biotechnology  environmental law  environmental politics