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Director's Blog (Archived)
Having just returned to the warmth of Tempe after a trip to the National Science Foundation’s Arlington, Virginia headquarters for a meeting of nanotechnology grantees, I’ve got a lot of science policy on my mind. The meeting consisted mostly of the directors or other spokespersons for nanotech research – from the smaller projects to the medium-sized NIRTs to the large NSECs and the sprawling networks – describing in programmatic detail their efforts to get to the bottom of things. It also featured a few discussions of the social, ethical, educational, and environmental issues associated with nano.
There are so many topics from the meeting I might address, but since there has been a lot of coverage recently of environmental issues in nanotechnology, I will stick to that. The current attention has been framed around whether or not the federal government is spending enough money on toxicological and other environmental research, to determine whether engineered nano-materials may end up being major environmental and health risks. The Woodrow Wilson Center recently released an inventory of federally funded research on environmental, health and safety aspects of nanotechnology, finding that there is a need for more resources, strategy, and partnerships and collaborations.
But (as is usual in science policy) arguments that we should be spending more on research miss a number of critical issues, some of which speak to the ironic state of the current politics of nanotechnology.
First, as my CSPO and CNS colleagues Dan Sarewitz and Ira Bennett describe in their forthcoming “Too Little, Too Late,” research on the societal implications of nanotechnology got off to an exceptionally slow start. This happened for a variety of reasons, but there is enough blame to go around – to the technocrats, nano-enthusiasts, and compliant politicians who started the National Nanotechnology Initiative with insufficient attention to how the social and environmental implications research was going to be funded, competed, and connected to the policy process, and to the social and environmental implications research community which was tardy in identifying the profound opportunity for inquiry and impact that nanotechnology offered. The irony, of course, is that the NNI is touted, not wrongly, as that major R&D initiative which has best confronted its societal implications, most welcomed its potential critics, and most actively sought out public involvement.
Second, advocates for nanotechnology often reveal an ironic contradiction when making their case for nano research and nano products. With respect to the former, they argue that nanotechnology is worthy of support because research at the atomic and molecular scale reveals new and unexpected properties of matter. For example, the same gold that you wear as jewelry because it does not react with other substances in the environment is highly reactive in nano-form, allowing scientists to attach it usefully to a variety of other molecules. But with respect to nano-products, advocates often argue that a substance is a substance, and that nano-sized substances should be regulated in the same way as their micro- or macro-sized cousins. So the nano-particles in your cosmetics or sunscreen may not have been subjected to detailed toxicological studies before arriving on the market because their micro-sized cousins had been deemed safe. Of course, if novel behaviors of materials are sought, and even expected, at the nano-scale, there is every reason to believe that some of this novelty would manifest itself in biological activity. The ironic contradiction here is emphasized by the relative lack of attention to date on scholarship by historians and philosophers of science who might scrutinize claims of scientific novelty, or by legal and policy scholars who might scrutinize claims of novelty in the regulatory process. We cannot make full sense of claims to the novelty or familiarity of nanotechnology without significant scholarship in these areas.
Third, the focus on the amount of environmental and toxicological research does not address what to do in the meantime, especially in research laboratories where scientists, technical staff, trainees, and non-technical staff such as cleaning personnel may be exposed to nano-materials or creating exposures for others by, for example, transferring nano-materials to labs (through interdisciplinary collaborations) that may not have the expertise or knowledge to handle the materials properly, or disposing of nano-materials in an inappropriate way. An irony lurks in a comparison between the way at least some researchers treat hazards in the laboratory and how society treats hazards publicly. Jim Yardley, managing director of Columbia University’s NSEC on Electron Transport in Molecular Nanostructures, pointed out at the DC meeting that chemists take tremendous precautions in the laboratory because they are often engaged in the creation of novel materials with unknown properties. They take these precautions despite having a great deal of knowledge and – likely – confidence in that knowledge and that of their colleagues, as well as the security of knowing that they have made an informed choice to work in that laboratory and create novel materials. (One might also add that chemists employed in universities and industry are also likely to have better health coverage for diagnosis and treatment than the average person.) And yet, when environmental or public health activists offer the precautionary principle as a policy response to uncharacterized risk, they are often portrayed as irrational and even anti-scientific – even though the public, unlike the chemists, has not willfully and knowingly adopted the risk and has less reason to feel secure in representations of skill and trustworthiness.
These ironies lead me to conclude that, in addition to
migrating “upstream” into the R&D process – as CNS-ASU, among other
examiners of emerging technologies (e.g.,
Demos), advocates – research and action
on the societal implications of nanotechnology need to migrate further upstream
into the policy process as well. Such a role for those often identified as
academic critics of science and technology would challenge them with
constructive engagement, but it would also challenge the ironic framing of
societal issues in nanotechnology that has been emerging.
The Problem with Nostradamus A lot of what nanotechnology is, as of yet is not. Like anything growing on an
exponential curve, for nano the future will bring orders of magnitude more than
the present sees and the past has lived. Appropriately, then, discussions of
nanotechnology have been populated as much by futurists and forecasters as by
experimentalists and technologists. And there have also been those chosen few
hailed as “prophets.”
In order for our ability to govern – that is, make social judgments about – emerging technologies like nanotechnology to improve, we must heed voices that describe plausible technological futures, to be sure. But we also need to develop the more prescriptive prophetic voice that helps us understand and commit to why any particular technological future deserves to come about.
Over the last two days, I’ve heard two of the nation’s top NSE researchers speak on their views about the technical and societal potential of nanotechnologies: George Poste, director of The Biodesign Institute and co-PI on the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at ASU; and George Whitesides, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard.
Poste talked to a small group of faculty at a regular lunch organized by the International Institute for Sustainability on “Synthetic Biology,” a domain at least in part overlapping with nano-biotechnology that includes such investigations as artificial genomes and directed evolution. Using techniques that treat nature as a proof of concept but not a limiting example, Poste believes that synthetic biology may soon acquire the ability to explore the vast majority of biospace that nature has not yet explored through 4.5 billion years of evolution on earth. That is, we may gain such control over the nanoscale machinery of biology that we can design and create living beings – not just adding a gene here or there to create phosphorescent bunnies, nor even resurrecting the bizarre sea creatures from the Cambrian explosion, but creating utterly new combinations, structures, and functions the likes of which nature has yet to imagine.
Whitesides spoke to the conference that launched the Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network (NISE Net), a group led by the Museum of Science in Boston and the Exploratorium in San Francisco and funded by NSF to engage the general public in nanotechnology. Whitesides provided a more basic primer on a variety of nanotechnologies, more appropriate to his audience, but he did engage some of the fantastic possibilities of nano-bio, particularly the attempts to understand and recreate the cellular mechanism for that create adenosine triphosphate, (ATP), the energy source of all living cells. The capacity to replicate such cellular machinery would not, for example, mean that we would be able to build Drexlerian assemblers, but it would enhance the possibility of the designing and controlling cells for specific human purposes.
So far, typical stuff from high profile scientists. But what makes these Georges curious is that they are both willing to talk openly about two things that most scientists – particularly leading ones – are not willing to talk about: identifying some research as irresponsible, and acknowledging the potential wisdom of lay-citizens. Poste’s talk, informed by his role on the US Defense Science Board and his reasoned apprehension of bioterrorism, identified several recent experiments that Poste believes would have been better left undone (the total synthesis of the polio virus) or unpublicized (the sequences of the 1918 pandemic influenza virus). Whitesides, informed by experiences as a public scientist and a tradition in Cambridge, MA that goes back to that community’s public hearings on recombinant DNA, described his belief that lay-citizens could be both competently informed about technical issues and exhibit the common sense and wisdom to make the right choices.
I did not find myself agreeing with Poste and Whitesides in all matters when they tread on my turf of societal implications – both, for example, have what I take to be a crudely rationalistic approach to issues of risk – but I applaud them for their willingness to acknowledge the responsibilities of scientific leadership in identifying irresponsible work in their midst and acknowledging not just the legitimate role of lay-citizens but their actual governing capacity.
We would all be better off if such Georges were not such curiosities among the scientific elite. |
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