02/18/2026
JOIN US and the Program in STS for a Brown Bag Talk “Becoming “Disease-Agnostic”: Translational Science, Biomedical Innovation, and the Valorization of Universal Utility in the Sciences” with Stephen Molldrem, Assistant Professor, Bioethics and Health Humanities, The University of Texas Medical Branch, on Friday, February 20, at 12:00pm in Sewall 570 and Zoom.
Click the link to register for the Zoom meeting: https://riceuniversity.zoom.us/meeting/register/UgrWitDLRfuyQDFxYTTidw #/registration
Translational science is a movement within the health sciences that developed in the 2000s. Scholarship about translational science has emphasized the field’s goal of re-orienting biomedicine toward moving knowledge more efficiently from “bench-to-bedside” (i.e., from discovery to commercialization). However, this focus has obscured another influential idea at the root of the translational imaginary: the notion that translational innovations ought to be applicable across many – or even all – disease areas, regardless of the therapeutic domain where an innovation was first developed. This so-called “disease-agnostic” or “disease-universal” approach emphasizes movements of knowledge from specific applications toward universal utility, complementing disease-specific “bench-to-beside” goals. In the US, the disease-agnostic orientation in translational science consolidated in the 2010s with the establishment of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences within the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In this talk, I draw on an analysis of grey literature documents and embedded work in an NIH-funded translational science institute to demonstrate the influence of the disease-agnostic idea on the development of the translational imaginary. I further argue that attending to its influence will be essential for understanding broader shifts in the sciences which valorize the production of innovations that purport to have universal utility.
Stephen Molldrem is an Assistant Professor in Bioethics and Health Humanities at The University of Texas Medical Branch. He is an ethnographer, qualitative social researcher, and health policy scholar situated mainly in Science and Technology Studies (STS). He also works across public health ethics, data studies, q***r studies, and global health. His collaborative and interdisciplinary work has been funded by numerous agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation.
