Reimagining Science Education To Build Capacity for Collaboration

“Certainly we learned some lessons, although most of them are rather negative. We have learned, perhaps, what not to do. But given the dilemma, it is not at all certain that we would act in a wiser fashion in the future.”

— Maxine Singer, American molecular biologist and Asilomar Conference organizer, 1979

Collective Nature of Scientific Work

The above quote from Singer refers to the International Meeting on Recombinant DNA Technology, a scientific meeting that took place in February 1975 at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, California. This historic meeting, known as “Asilomar,” was convened to address safety concerns related to precision genetic engineering — a development once imagined in science fiction that had become scientific reality, now more than 50 years ago. While this meeting shaped the global landscape of biological research, it has a complicated history, particularly surrounding the limited invitee list and discussion priorities. It set the standard for scientific self-regulation, but are these standards that science should continue to follow? 

Exactly 50 years after the 1975 meeting, leaders across disciplines convened at Asilomar for “The Spirit of Asilomar and the Future of Biotechnology” global summit. This summit had many improvements from the 1975 meeting yet was still emblematic of science’s tendency toward isolated rather than collective approaches to thought. The summit’s structure and conversations reflected a long-standing trend in science and engineering training, as curricula largely focus on siloing students and early-career scholars into individual subfields without considering the broader political, social, and economic contexts their research both inhabits and affects. 

To better serve science and the public, science and engineering programs should include interdisciplinary training in ethics, social inequality, governance, sociology, and history to reflect the collaborative and complex nature of research and technological advancement.

Asilomar’s Legacy and Lessons for the Future

In the early 1970s, concerns about the unmitigated potential of recombinant DNA technology led to a voluntary international moratorium on related research. Attendees at Asilomar helped lay the foundations for biosafety regulations that are still followed today. The meeting marked a significant milestone in biologists grappling with the social consequences of their work. However, it has a complicated legacy. Criticism surrounded the attendee list, which lacked meaningful global representation as well as sociologists, bioethicists, and early-career scientists — many of whom conducted the lab research discussed at the meeting and for whom these decisions would largely define their careers.

In 2025, approximately 300 natural scientists, historians, social scientists, journalists, and artists from around the world gathered at the Asilomar grounds for “The Spirit of Asilomar and the Future of Biotechnology” global summit. This summit commemorated the 50th anniversary of the 1975 meeting and looked forward to the next 50 years of biotechnology. Last year’s summit retained many aspects of the 1975 meeting’s spirit: big ideas, general confusion, debates among attendees, last-minute pivots, and work late into the night.

Specifically, the summit consisted of working groups across five themes: pathogens research and biological weapons; artificial intelligence and biotechnology; synthetic cells; biotechnologies beyond conventional containment, and frameworks for biotechnology’s futures. The full collection of post-summit entreaties is available in an open-access repository through Rice University.

Next Generation Leaders Look Toward Creativity

One notable difference between “The Spirit of Asilomar” and the inaugural meeting was an attempt to incorporate more diverse voices into the conversation. The summit’s Next Generation Leaders (NGL) program consisted of 60 young researchers, community organizers, founders, and historians from around the world. The authors were three of the NGL’s co-chairs.

The NGL program spanned an array of disciplines, worldviews, cultural identities, and educational experiences. Yet the group landed in the same place, seeing similar patterns across biotechnology as well as desiring to build new solutions together and reimagine how scientific research is conducted.

Despite this progress, “The Spirit of Asilomar” largely remained a microcosm of a culture in science that trains scientists to separate scientific research from the political, social, and economic forces that shape it. Much of the meeting’s discussion centered on technocratic optimism with little mention of the unpredictable sociopolitical climate that young scientists are currently navigating.

Conference remarks on community engagement tended to be vague, nominal, and narrowly focused on public acceptance of new technologies. These mentions often overlooked the expertise of social scientists and humanists. Overall, the meeting highlighted a lack of imagination and collaboration in how science considers its role in society and in training the next generation of researchers.

Policy Context and Institutional Challenges for Science

As the one-year anniversary of “The Spirit of Asilomar” approaches, policy changes affecting scientific institutions during the second Trump administration’s first year come into sharp relief. Substantial changes include: mass firings across government agencies leading to decreased capacity and scientific expertise; modifications in the peer-review process for federal grants and policies; complete dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives; government officials contradicting scientific consensus; and restrictions on certain research topics.

These new policies — and the rhetoric surrounding them — have intensified the sociopolitical climate shaping trust, scientific institutions, and education. Those in the sciences have attempted to tackle this wide-spread uncertainty by either trying to recover outdated systems or innovating new avenues. This moment calls on those in the sciences — from research, instruction, advocacy, to policy — to reimagine how the next generation of scientists is trained and educated.

Individualism in STEM Education

Traditional science and engineering education often silos students into their subfields, largely at the expense of learning from other disciplines and developing more holistic analytical methods. This approach often fails to equip students to understand the complex relationships among society, politics, economics, and STEM. It overlooks opportunities to teach skills that help students navigate practical challenges and the broader societal impacts of their research. As a result, many scientists entering the workforce with the best intentions of becoming entrepreneurs, policy advisors, advocates, or active community members may struggle to achieve the outcomes they expect.

Scientists are often not trained to work with other forms of expertise, which may lead them to assert broad intellectual authority over social issues rather than assembling interdisciplinary teams that include social scientists, professional science communicators, and community advocates. This can lead to strained relationships with the communities they intended to serve, ineffective or harmful legislation, and technologies that discount historical precedent or are incongruent with existing systems and cultures. To build better science, the field should begin reexamining its foundational practices.

How STEM Education Can Foster Collaboration

Training scientists and engineers to rely primarily on individual work rather than collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches conflicts with the interconnected nature of society. Instead, they should engage in collaborative, open-science frameworks that allow for interdisciplinary analysis of the issues they aim to solve. Implementing interdisciplinary frameworks would help avoid the creation of narrow technological fixes to issues entangled with social inequities, and thus, enable the development of more effective and impactful solutions. In this reimagined approach, social sciences and the humanities are pillars of scientific research, not disciplines passively shaped by technological development.

Effective coproduction calls for more than a willingness to collaborate. It is a skill that requires practice and a foundational understanding of others’ methods and expertise. Meaningfully engaging with diverse publics, such as community members or policymakers, requires knowledge of historical context and the real-world dynamics that shape communities’ priorities, experiences, and adoption of technology.

Ultimately, science and engineering curricula should be reformed to include training in the ethical and social dimensions of research, collective problem-solving, governance, sociology, and history. This would better reflect the inherently collaborative and complex nature of technological development and knowledge creation.

Current Efforts To Promote Interdisciplinary Training

Around the world, efforts to emphasize science’s collaborative nature are already underway through interdisciplinary degree programs, cross-departmental classes, and informal learning outside traditional academic institutions. Fundamentally interdisciplinary fields, such as science and technology studies, environmental studies, and medical humanities, have been building pedagogy for interdisciplinary scholarship for decades. A post-summit entreaty led by the NGL program, “Broadening Science Education within Existing Structures,” offers a critical analysis and examples of deeply interdisciplinary higher education within the life sciences. 

While science and engineering programs that cultivate collaborative skills are emerging, their implementation comes at a high cost. Researchers pursuing these efforts often do so in addition to their heavy workloads, largely without institutional or financial support. Engagement in science policy, social equity, and science communication remains limited, as these activities are often misaligned with traditional Ph.D. requirements and tenure metrics.

Building Science as a Collective Practice

Scientists, engineers, and those in training should critically and responsibly reflect on the past, present, and many possible futures that lie ahead for these disciplines and their applications. The field’s status quo is evolving, and assertions of unilateral intellectual authority are no longer tenable.

Science education and research should foster co-creation, with universities supporting this shift by adapting degree requirements, departmental structures, tenure incentives, and educational priorities to make interdisciplinary work attainable, broadly applicable, and tangibly impactful.

This publication was produced by Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. Wherever feasible, the material was reviewed by outside experts prior to release. Any errors or omissions are solely the responsibility of the author(s).

This material may be quoted or reproduced without prior permission, provided appropriate credit is given to the author(s) and Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. The views expressed herein are those of the individual author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.