Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Cells Do Fly

Abstract

Cell therapy and regenerative medicine are, like many other areas of bioscience, increasingly tied to translational aspirations to deliver improved healthcare, often manifest as pipeline models of delivery and the discourse of impact. However, it is simultaneously evident to most academics—be they scientists or not—that the pipeline idiom is inadequate to encompass the iterative, looping, and often circuitous realities of ‘translating’ knowledge into products and applications. This chapter argues that in the future, we will have to move beyond linear models of progress to incorporate ‘churn’, ‘circularity’, and ‘conversations’ as the 3Cs in the co-produced future of science and social science. In so arguing, the chapter maps out the various ‘intersections’ between social and basic science.