Ethics, Science, and the PublicKavli Centers

Motivated by our founder’s vision to advance science for the benefit of humanity, we launched two Kavli Centers for Ethics, Science and the Public, at UC Berkeley and Cambridge University. The Centers focus on addressing an unmet need within all of science: a proactive and sustained effort to connect scientists, ethicists, social scientists, science communicators, and publics to discuss potential impacts of scientific discoveries. While there is increasing recognition within the scientific community that the public should be involved, mechanisms and infrastructure to do this are lacking.

With the Kavli Centers for Ethics, Science, and the Public, infrastructure that enables early and intentional public engagement in the ethical considerations born from scientific discoveries is being created. UC Berkeley will reimagine how scientists are trained, beginning in the fields of neuroscience, genetics, and artificial intelligence, and Cambridge University will explore how ethical implications raised by science are tackled in different cultural contexts within the domains of genomics, big data, health research, and emerging technologies.