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http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/10/2005101005n.htm The two largest grants will go to Arizona State University at Tempe and the University of California at Santa Barbara. They will get $6.2-million and $5-million, respectively, over five years. Smaller awards went to the University of South Carolina and Harvard University to expand projects that the NSF had already started supporting.
The effort is a smaller version of a group of social-science studies that were financed as part of the Human Genome Project, the effort to map all human genes that was completed in 2003. Those studies received a guaranteed 5 percent of the funds for the genome project.
The young science of nanotechnology aims to create extremely small materials and devices with novel properties by manipulating matter at the atomic scale, and the technology's potential applications, which touch the realm of science fiction, have prompted both excitement and fear (The Chronicle, September 10, 2004.) A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, or roughly 100,000 times smaller than the thickness of a strand of human hair.
One use of such technology, for example, could involve implanting nano-sized sensors in the human body to monitor a person's physical health. But privacy advocates are concerned that such information could be stolen. Environmentalists are worried that nano-sized particles could cause a new form of difficult-to-control pollution. Even supporters of nanotechnology agree that these questions deserve more study lest the public reject the technology the way some people, especially in Europe, have refused to eat food from genetically modified crops (The Chronicle, April 14, 2000).
Until now, the federal government has been financing research to develop nanotechnology -- a total of $1-billion this year -- but has spent relatively little on studying its social ramifications, and the projects it has supported have not significantly involved social scientists.
Since 2000 the NSF has financed 21 large research projects to develop the actual technology. While those awards required that the recipients devote some time to studying the technology's social implications, the social-implications research appears to have been limited in scope. Several projects involved no more than some public seminars, said Ira M. Bennett, a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State who has tracked the social-implications studies.
The NSF has previously financed some separate grants for social-implications research through its division of social and behavioral sciences. But those amounted to only about $10-million from 1997 to 2004, according to Mr. Bennett. The NSF's latest round of grants, awarded last week, will increase that significantly.
The Arizona State center will focus on issues including privacy, security, and the technology's potential applications in enhancing the human body. It will also experiment with a novel approach teaming social and natural scientists to try to steer the development of the technology, as it is occurring, to maximize beneficial effects and minimize negative ones.
The Santa Barbara center will study, among other topics, society's perception of risks surrounding the new technology. |
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