Responsible innovation has been introduced as an important condition for advancing the field of regenerative medicine. This is reflected in the frequent references to responsible research conduct and responsible innovation in guidelines and recommendations in academic literature. The meaning of responsibility, how responsibility could be fostered and the context in which responsibilities should be enacted, however, remain unclear. The goal of this paper is to clarify the concept of responsibility in stem cell research and to illustrate how this concept could inform strategies to deal effectively with the ethical implications of stem cell research. Responsibility can be dissected into four categories: responsibility-as-accountability, responsibility-as-liability, responsibility-as-an-obligation and responsibility-as-a-virtue. The authors focus on responsible research conduct and responsible innovation in general to move beyond the scope of research integrity and illustrate that different notions of responsibility have different implications for how stem cell research is organized.
Keywords: RRI; bioethics; ethics; responsibility; responsible innovation; stem cells.
Literature and guidelines mention that responsible innovation could help the field of stem cell research to deal with ethical challenges. However, in this literature and guidelines it does not become clear how ‘responsibility' should be understood, how responsibilities are recognized, how responsibilities are shared and how someone could take responsibility. In this article, different types of responsibility are discussed: responsibility-as-accountability, responsibility-as-liability, responsibility-as-an-obligation and responsibility-as-a-virtue. The types are discussed according to how they are different from one another and how they can be used to organize stem cell research. It is shown that these different types of responsibility help not only with research integrity issues but also with societal and other types of ethical challenges.