The temple of Asclepios, the Greek god of healing arts and medicine, at Epidaurus was pretty much the ancient Greek world’s equivalent of the Mayo Clinic. It then tells us a lot about the Greek worldview of healing that one of the things the temple complex prominently featured was a theatre. The Greeks believed in drama therapy, but in perhaps a slightly different way of how we think of it today.

Hi everyone, welcome to the 3rd edition of my newsletter! Besides the fact that we have suffered the first official heat wave in Belgium this year, I have other hot information to share.

I have been thinking regularly about complicity for the last several years. It became a central ethical theme of mine in 2016 and it has occupied my thoughts and ideas since.

On Friday, March 17, The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) published a reform proposal that promises to improve working conditions in research. This was followed by a massive wave of criticism and protest from scientists across status groups and disciplines.

Introduction The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic led to a global and accelerated digitalisation of all education systems. This quickly revealed many inequalities in access to digital resources and lack of digital skills. What concrete impact has this had on learners and teachers worldwide? How can we address these inequalities in education?

Human history is ridden with dreams of utopias. Ideas and visions outlining societies or communities that are free from faults and flaws, running perfectly according to plan. There is no shortage of examples. Many are political, some religious and others stacked somewhere in between.

In a recent paper that has attracted the interest of popular media as well, Fabio Urbina and colleagues examined the use (or rather, the abuse) of computational chemistry models of toxicity for generating toxic compounds and potential chemical agent candidates.(Urbina et al. 2022) Urbina and colleagues conclude that Urbina, Fabio, Filippa Lentzos, Cédric Invernizzi, and Sean Ekins. 2022.

Every year, the Commandant of the Marine Corps publishes a reading list of books that often only bear on warfighting tangentially at best. The idea behind this is that those entrusted with the lives of servicemembers should have an understanding of the world that goes beyond the profession of arms. In much the same way, I have been advising data scientists to go beyond professional literature.

An Appeal for a Culture of Failure in Academia Mafalda Sandrini For some years now there has been a trend amongst entrepreneurs and artists to come together to exchange stories of failure by disclosing their mistakes on a big stage and acknowledging what they lacked in insight and wisdom. This is framed as a practice of openness for the good of the many, as well as for themselves.

This interview is done in personal capacity and based on insights such as recently published in the “International Handbook on Responsible Innovation: A Global Resource”. In 2013, you introduced a vision for Responsible Research and Innovation.