The new life sciences and biotechnologies have challenged our classical understanding of being human, on an individual and private level as well as on a being in society. While new rearrangement of the nature/culture borders, and the advent of new biotechnologies, appealed to a deep rethinking of society and the world. Therefore, educational experts and policy-makers have engaged themselves in the development of new ways to make research and innovation processes accessible to every citizen. The main goal of our project is the promotion of a new idea of "scientific citizenship" for our society, in other words, to offer to citizens adequate educational, cognitive and critical tools to orient themselves through the several streams of knowledge related to LSB that they encounters in everyday life. In this context we focus on infertility perception by young people, because, according to World Health Organization (WHO), the infertility affects 15-20% of couples in industrialized countries, and the causes are multifactorial, which means that the problem can depend on both genetic and environmentals genetic factors. Considering the complex nature of this issue, our project is aimed to highlight the contents and, above all, the strategies of societal engagement that can be developed in order to answer to the new challenges of 21st century knowledge society, both in an academic environment (internal communication of science) and in the wider, more complex social dimension (science outreach, formal and informal education). As support in these strategies we choose the ICTs because of its availability, anonymity and low access cost are an increasingly common way for young people to find information on sensitive issues. The findings also reveal that chat and email services may represent alternative channels, for public institutions, to address the health care needs of young people and tools to create a link between young people and health care experts.
This is an interdepartmental project, that involves tree departments of the Sapienza University of Rome: the Department of Communication and Social Research, the Department of Environmental Biology, the Department of Philosophy.
The interdisciplinarity of the project can highlight new models of communications (between experts as well as in the public sphere) able to answer to the needs of the "knowledge citizenship" of 21 st century, and promote a critical participation in life sciences developments. Based on the assumption of a shared methodology, involving both theoretical and applied sides of researches in bio-medical science, our project focuses not only on basic research, but also on the development of useful applications that aim to better understand and address new discoveries' effects on society. The main goals of this knowledge translation will be devoted to develop a better response to the social dimension of scientific debates (in politics, bioethics, economy) . Acknowledging the existence of "false myths" and misrepresentations in contemporary public sphere (even including in the educational system), either research group will develop an interdisciplinary analysis of different issues, from those emerged in the new debates on infertility.
In public health the ICTs can influence perception of disease severity, views about the potential risk of contracting a disease, or feelings about the need for prevention or treatment. The ICTs can also break the cycle of misinformation and lack of information about health conditions that are underdiagnosed, undertreated or underreported. Carey (1998) pointed out that new ICTs are creating a new media ecology that alters structural relations among old media and displaces a national system of communications. The health issues are universal, concerning everybody in the world. In our global society where diseases know no borders, countries are increasingly recognizing the importance of improving health conditions both domestically and abroad. New ICTs are globally deployed and have significant impacts on the way people access to health information. New ICTS are an effective mechanism for detecting, responding to, preventing, and controlling global health concerns. At no time in history are media more prolific and widely available to everyday citizens. Users increasingly may become the producers and vectors of informative content rather than mere recipients, increasing peer communication about health, and about the risks of unhealthy lifestyles. Nevertheless, additional efforts are needed to stimulate usage at a micro (target group, intermediaries) and a macro level (socio-political and institutional). It has been recommended that this could be encouraged by means of peer-to-peer initiatives, as members of the target group tend to closely identify with their peers.
The new methodology to be developed has to be especially oriented to science education, which still remains the most accessible and accountable strategy of knowledge dissemination in the contemporary scenario. As it has been recently pointed out, science education in 21st century society should help citizens to «access and interpret the science they need in response to specific practical problems», as well as «judge the credibility of scientific claims based on both evidence and institutional cues, and cultivate deep amateur involvement in science» (Feinstein, Allen and Jenkins 2013). Our project aims to demonstrate how, and by which strategies, an interdisciplinary approach can fulfill this task and overcome the limitations that characterized other previous attempts in this direction. Again, a processual consilience is at the core of our theoretical and methodological research. The role of history and philosophy of science has been documented in educational contexts, although sociology played a minor role in it (Kelly 2013). Further, although several benefits for teaching and learning science and scientific culture through these disciplines have been underlined, a lack of practical implementations have been recorded (Höttecke and Silva 2010). A focus on science education is expected to benefit the project main goal, offering continuous feedbacks from the social contexts of formal and informal science education, and at the same time allowing the definition of an approach to science studies thought as "in and for" society. Based on the assumption of a shared methodology, involving both theoretical and applied sides of researches in biomedical science, our project focuses not only on basic research, but also on the development of useful applications that aim to better understand and address new discoveries' effects on Italian society. The main goals of this knowledge translation will be devoted: to develop a better response to the social dimension of scientific debates (in politics, bioethics, economy) and to translate science studies into life-long learning activity.