Category: Social and economic aspects of nanotechnology

More about Nanohype

Having spent 9 hours in aeroplanes yesterday (not to mention another 6 hours hanging about in a snowy Philadelphia airport waiting for a delayed connection) I have at least had a chance to catch up with some reading. This included two nano- books, one of which was David Berube‘s “Nanohype“. The other (which exemplifies the phenomenon of Berube’s title) was “The Dance of Molecules: how nanotechnology is changing our lives“, by Ted Sargent. I’m reviewing Sargent’s book for Nature, so I’ll save my views on it for later.

“Nanohype” isn’t exactly the usual airport book, though. It’s a rather dense, and extremely closely referenced, account of the way nanotechnology moved from being a staple of futurists and science fiction writers to being the new new thing for technophilic politicians and businessmen, and a new object of opposition for environmentalists and anti-globalisers. For those of us fascinated by the minutiae of how the National Nanotechnology Initiative got going, and of the ways the Nanobusiness Alliance influenced public policy in the USA, it’s going to be the essential source.

The book’s title makes Berube’s basic position pretty clear. Almost everyone involved has some ulterior motive for overstating how revolutionary nanotechnology is going to be, how much money it’s going to make, or the scale of the apocalypse it is going to lead to. Scientists need grants, companies need venture capital, campaigning organisations need publicity and the donations that follow. Not everyone is a huckster, but those that remain idealists end up so divorced from reality that they end up attracting Berube’s (no doubt unwelcome) sympathy. Sometimes the search for low motives leads from bracing cynicism to the brink of absurdity, such as his suggestion that anti-globalisation activist Zak Goldsmith’s opposition to genetic modification of food derives from his wife’s business interests in organic food. This seems a little unlikely, given Goldsmith’s reported £300 million inherited fortune. But Berube’s refusal to take things at face value is a refreshing starting point.

The book has a competent and fairly complete overview of those commercial applications ascribed to nanotechnology, but one thing this book is not about is science. I think this is a pity – there’s an interesting story to be told both about the ascendance of the nanotechnology label amongst academic scientists, and of the resistance, suspicion and cynicism that this has bred in some quarters. But this will have to wait for another chronicler; curiously even giants of academic nanoscience, like Rick Smalley and George Whitesides, appear here as antagonists for the Drexler vision rather than for their own considerable achievements.

Of course, this is a book about politics, not science. It’s about the high-level politics around science funding, the politics of the financial markets, the politics of the campaigning organisation. But despite this political theme, it’s curiously light on ideologies. When we are talking about the societal and ethical implications of nanotechnology, we’re talking about competing visions of the future, competing ideologies. It is striking that many of the protagonists in the nanotechnology debates are driven by very strongly held, and sometimes far from mainstream, creeds. There’s the millenarianism of the transhumanists, the characteristically American libertarianism exemplified by blogger and nano-enthusiast Glenn Reynolds, and on the opposition side the strange blend of radical anti-capitalism, green politics and reactionary conservatism that underlies the world-view of Zak Goldsmith (particularly interesting in the UK now that a newly resurgent conservative opposition party has charged Goldsmith with reviewing its environmental policies). I would like to see a much closer analysis of the deeper reasons why nanotechnology seems to be emerging as a focus of these more profound arguments, but perhaps it’s still too early for this.

Scenarios for the future of transport

The UK government established a new horizon-scanning unit in its Office and Science and Technology a few years ago, and this has now issued its first report. This takes a look at likely scenarios for transport infrastructures over the next fifty years, but since transport and communications are so central to our economy these scenarios form a fairly comprehensive look at how new technology might change the way we live. In particular, they cover three big questions about technology and the future:

  • Where will the energy that currently underwrites our lifestyle in the developed world come from?
  • How will we exploit the growing amount of information processing and communication power we will have at our disposal?
  • Will the world carry on its trend to centralisation in manufacturing and energy generation, or will we see a switch to increasingly decentralised modes of production?

    • The web-site has links to lot of excellent material, including many interesting, specially commissioned background papers, but perhaps the most interesting things are the Project overview (54 page PDF), and the Scenarios (89 page PDF). The latter bring the subject to life with four plausible, but highly contrasting, scenarios for how things might turn out.

    The techno-optimist’s scenario is called “Perpetual motion”. Here it’s assumed that technology has managed to overcome the problems of sustainable energy with some combination of the hydrogen economy, nuclear fuels, coal and carbon sequestration. Everything and everyone is plugged in to the information grid, and the major problem the world faces is workplace stress. There’s a green nirvana too: “Urban colonies” imagines a future of sustainable urbanisation, where personal transport is discouraged by heavy taxation. Energy comes from microgrids, there is universal recycling and reuse. People are prosperous, but the economy revolves around fewer goods and more services. Iin short, it’s a vision of the future in which everywhere looks like Copenhagen, rather than Seoul. But, on the principle that the statistically most accurate way of predicting the weather tomorrow is to look out of the window today, what is considered the most likely scenario is called “Good intentions”. This is a world in which hard decisions have been put off until too late. Transport is both highly congested and highly priced; there’s been some progress with biofuels but accelerating climate change is leading to increasingly frequent weather disasters. Both prosperity and personal freedom are compromised.

    Techno-optimists think that the accelerating pace of technological advances will determine how the world changes, while green-tinged social liberals believe that the future can be deliberately shaped by human, democratic values. There is a third, much uglier, possibility; that we will be unable to prevail over overwhelming societal strains imposed by external shocks. This is the world of the most pessimistic scenario, “Tribal trading”. Here an early end to the era of cheap energy has stripped the veneer from our globalised world. A decline in oil production has led to spiralling oil prices. Economic depression has ended with the near-complete collapse of world and national financial systems, with resource wars and environmental disasters adding to the gloom. It’s a world of walls and borders and vegetable gardens, in which the 90’s experience of Cuba offers some of the best coping strategies. Some technology survives, and with travel over even modest distances prohibitively difficult and expensive, robust communications are more important than ever. For advice, we’re directed to the poet Gary Snyder:

    “What is to be done? Learn to be more self-reliant, reduce your desires, and take care of yourself and your family”.

    Nanotechnologies, public engagement and the policy makers

    I was in London on Monday, making a brief appearance before the Nanotechnology Issues Dialogue Group. This is the UK government committee that brings together officials from all Government departments with an interest in nanotechnology, to coordinate the government’s response to the issues raised by the Royal Society report. I was there to talk about the work of Nanotechnology Engagement Group, a body funded by the government’s Office of Science and Technology and run by the NGO Involve.

    The role of the NEG is essentially to carry out a rolling meta-study of public engagement exercises around nanotechnology in the UK and elsewhere; I’m chairing it and together with project director Richard Wilson we were giving the government officials a bit of a preview of our first report, which will be published in a month or so. I’ll wait until the report is out before saying much about it, but in the spirit of open government I’m sure the officials won’t mind me reproducing the pictorial record of the meeting below.

    and when did you last see your father?
    Richard Jones attempts to persuade the government officials of the Nanotechnology Issues Dialogue Group of the importance of public engagement.

    On Nanohype

    David Berube’s new book on nanotechnology, Nanohype, is reviewed in this week’s Nature (subscription required). The review is, in truth, not very favourable, but I’m not going to comment on that until my own copy of Nanohype makes it from the Amazon warehouse across the Atlantic. As is often the case, though, the major message of the review is that this is not the book that the reviewer would have written, which in this case is rather interesting, as the reviewer was Harry Collins, one of the foremost exponents of the discipline of the sociology of science.

    Collins’s research method is in-depth studies of scientific communities, in which he attempts to uncover the often tacit shared values that underly the scientific enterprise. As such, he is rather sceptical about the value of written material: “science is an oral culture. Although science’s spokespersons rattle on endlessly about peer review, the vast majority of published papers, peer reviewed or not, are largely ignored by scientists in the field. The problem that would face an alien from another planet who wanted to make a digest of terrestrial science from the literature alone would be about as bad as that facing a lay person who tries to understand it by reading everything on the Internet.”

    Here’s why nanotechnology is interesting – as a scientific culture it barely exists yet. In contrast to the fields that Collins has studied – most recently, the search for gravitational waves – the idea of nanotechnology as a field has been imposed from the outside the scientific community, by the forces which I imagine Berube’s book documents, rather than emerging from within it. So the community shared values that Collins’s work aims to uncover are not yet even agreed upon.

    For those readers who are sceptical about the very idea of the sociology of science, the BBC is currently broadcasting a pair of very interesting documentaries about how science works, called Under Laboratory Conditions; the first one, broadcast last Wednesday on the BBCs digital service BBC4, rang very true to me (and I say this not just because I made a brief appearance in the program myself).

    Writing the history of the nanobot

    The nanobot – the tiny submarine gliding through the bloodstream curing all our ills – is one of the most powerful images underlying the public perception of nanotechnology. In the newspapers, it seems compulsory to illustrate any article about any sort of nanotechnology with a fanciful picture of a nanobot and a Fantastic Voyage reference. Yet, to say that nanoscientists are ambivalent about these images is putting it mildly. Amongst the more sober nanobusiness and nanoscience types, the word nanobot is shorthand for everything they despise about the science fiction visions that nanotechnology has attracted. For my own part, I’ve argued that the popular notions of the nanobot are an embodiment of the fallacy that advanced nanotechnology will look like conventional engineering shrunk in size. And even followers of Drexler, in an attempt to head off fears of the grey goo dystopia of out-of-control self-replicating nanobots, have taken to downplaying their importance and arguing that their brand of advanced nanotechnology will take the form of innocent desktop devices looking rather like domestic bread-making machines.

    The power of the nanobot image in the history of nanotechnology is emphasized by a recent article by a social scientist from the University of Nottingham, Brigitte Nerlich. This article, From Nautilus to Nanobo(a)ts: The Visual Construction of Nanoscience traces the evolution of the nanobot image from its antecendents in science fiction, going back to Jules Verne, through Fantastic Voyage, right through to those stupid nanobot images that irk scientists so much. Nerlich argues that ” popular culture and imagination do not simply follow and reflect science. Rather, they are a critical part of the process of developing science and technology; they can inspire or, indeed, discourage researchers to turn what is thinkable into new technologies and they can frame the ways in which the ‘public’ reacts to scientific innovations.”

    Attempts to write the nanobot out of the history of nanotechnology thus seem doomed, so we had better try and rehabilitate the concept. If we accept that the shrunken submarine image is hopelessly misleading, how can we replace it by something more realistic?

    Let’s prevail

    Martyn Amos draws our attention to the collection of dangerous ideas on The Edge – the website of every popular science writer’s favourite literary agent, John Brockman. He asked a collection of writer-scientists to nominate their dangerous idea for 2006, and the result has something for everyone. Like Martyn, I very much like Lynn Margulis’s comments about the bacterial origins of our sensory perceptions. I’d want to go further, with the statement that human brains have more in common with colonies of social bacteria than with microprocessors.

    Devotees of the nanobot have Ray Kurzweil arguing that radical life extension and expansion, enabled by radical nanotechnology, is as inevitable as it is desirable. The apparent problems of overpopulation will be overcome because “molecular nanoassembly devices will be able to manufacture a wide range of products, just about everything we need, with inexpensive tabletop devices. “ Readers of Soft Machines will already know why I think Drexlerian nanotechnology isn’t going to lead us to this particular cornucopia. To my mind, though, the biggest danger of radical life extension isn’t overpopulation; it’s stagnation and boredom. Every generation has needed its angry young men and women, its punk rockers, to spark its creativity, and even as I grow older the thought of the world being run by a gerontocracy doesn’t cheer me up.

    So I’m with Joel Garreau, in hoping that despite environmental challenges and the frightening speed of technological change, we’ll see “the ragged human convoy of divergent perceptions, piqued honor, posturing, insecurity and humor once again wending its way to glory”. In the nice phrase Garreau used in his book Radical Evolution – let’s prevail.

    Eat up your buckyballs (for your liver’s sake)

    The discovery by Eva Oberdorster that the molecule C60, or buckminster fullerene, caused brain damage in large mouthed bass received huge publicity when it was first reported, (see here for a relatively level-headed account). This work has now become one of the main underpinning texts of the belief that there is something uniquely dangerous about nanomaterials. It’s interesting, though perhaps not surprising, that a recent article in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters, which reaches an exactly opposite conclusion, (abstract, subscription required for full article) has received no publicity at all.

    In this work, from Fathi Moussa’s group in the Department of Pharmacy in Université Paris XI, it is shown that not only did C60 not have a toxic effect on the rats and mice it was tested on; it also protected rat’s livers from the toxic effects of carbon tetrachloride, an effect ascribed to C60’s powerful anti-oxidant properties. The paper is not reticent in its criticism of the earlier work; it ascribes the apparent toxic effects previously observed to the fact that the C60 was prepared in an organic solvent, THF, which was not completely removed when a water-suspension of C60 was prepared. In short, it was the toxic effects of THF that were affecting the unfortunate fish, not those of C60. The tone of these comments is suprisingly caustic for a peer reviewed paper, and it finishes with a note of magnificent Gallic sarcasm. Referring to reports that naturally occurring fullerenes (presumably from the soot from forest fires) have been discovered in fossil dinosaur eggs, the authors ask “we feel that it cannot be said that the C60 discovered in dinosaur eggs was the origin of the mass extinction of these animals, or was it?”

    I should stress that I’m not advocating that Soft Machines readers should immediately consume a large quantity of C60 and then start abusing solvents, nor should we now assume that fullerenes are entirely safe and without potential environmental problems. But there are a couple of lessons we should draw from this. Firstly, toxicology is not necessarily easy to get right. But perhaps the most important lesson is that learning about science from press releases is very misleading. What appear to be the big breakthroughs at the time get lots of coverage, but the follow-up work, which can modify or even completely contradict the initial big story, barely gets noticed.

    The Wild, Wild East

    There’s a developing conventional wisdom about the way science and technology in general, and nanotechnology in particular, is developing in Asia. This comes in two parts: firstly, it’s noted that the Asian countries – particularly China – are set to overtake the west in science and technology, and then it’s suggested that what will help these countries gain their new supremacy is the fact that there, technology will be developed without moral scruples, in contrast to the self-inflicted handicaps that Western countries are suffering. These handicaps, conventional wisdom further asserts, take the form, in the United States, of opposition from the religious right to the entire secular, scientific worldview, while in Europe anti-growth, left-wing environmentalists are the major culprits. The idea of a lawless, wild east, where technological stuff just gets done without agonising about social and environmental consequences, is becoming a bit of a bogeyman for western politicians, as nicely pointed out in this recent Demos pamphlet.

    Clearly the rapid development of nanotechnology, together with biotechnology and other branches of advanced applied science, in China, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, is a significant and important story that’s likely to profoundly change the shape of the world political economy over the next twenty years. But I can’t entirely buy in to the current mood of panic about this. Firstly, idealistic though I may be, I don’t believe that the development of science and technology is a zero-sum game. The opposite, in fact – the benefits of technological advances can spread from their place of invention very rapidly round the world. Given on the one hand, the very urgent environmental and developmental problems that need to be solved in the world now, and on the other, the entirely legitimate aspirations of the citizens of less developed countries to the lifestyles we enjoy in the west, the rapid development of science and technology in countries like China should be welcomed. Secondly, it just doesn’t seem plausible that science and technology really will develop in these countries without being constrainted by societal values. I know much less than I would like about the cultures, beliefs and values of these different countries, but I’m sure that societal and ethical issues will be hugely important in steering the development of technology there, even though some of those issues may be different from the ones that are important in the west. And just as the west consists of many different countries with societal values that differ from each other in important ways, the idea of a monolithic set of “Asian values” must be at best a gross oversimplification.

    An interesting little vignette that illuminates some of these issues is provided by the recent saga about the troubles of the Korean stem cell pioneer Hwang Woo-Suk. Heavily criticised in the west for the ethical lapse of using donated eggs from his own graduate students, he has been strongly defended in his native Korea. At first sight, this seems to exactly support the conventional wisdom – in this view the Koreans have gained a world-leading position in stem-cell research by simply pressing ahead while western countries – particularly, in this case, the USA – have hesitated due to moral and religious qualms. But, as discussed in this very interesting article in the Economist, the reality is probably rather more complex and nuanced.

    Joint Japan-UK meeting on health, environmental and societal impacts of nanotechnologies

    The Royal Society has published a report on a workshop they held jointly with the Science Council of Japan to discuss health, environmental and societal impacts of nanotechnologies. The report can be downloaded as a PDF from this site, together with the PDFs of all the presentations made, or you can read the press release.

    The focus of the meeting was, as usual, on the potential toxicity of free, manufactured nanoparticles. Calls were made for increased government funding of toxicology studies, for increased openness from industry about the methods and results of their own testing, for consistent international standards, and for more emphasis on studies of the effect of nanoparticles on the environment. The timing of the publication is interesting – the press release notes that “The report is released ahead of the expected publication of the Government’s research programme on nanotechnologies next week”.

    China not, after all, #2 in nanotechnology – Lux Research

    My post on Wednesday about the reported claim that China was now #2 in nanotechnology in the world, as measured by output of nanoscience publications, brought a detailed and useful response by email from Matthew Nordan from Lux Research. He pointed out that the study that the Small Times report was based on aggregated a total of 17 metrics, of which the publications count I was referring to was only one. Taking the overall picture, China was still weak both in nanotechnology activity and in its capacity to use nanotechnology to drive economic growth. The only two measures on which it is currently strong is in the publications count that I was discussing, whose shortcomings Matthew acknowledges, and in total spending. There are some pertinent comments about the difficulty of ranking expenditure measures over on TNTlog. Nonethless, China’s capability is growing fast.

    The way this story has been reported is an interesting case study in how commentators look for the story they want to see. “China rising” is a powerful narrative at the moment, and any evidence that can be beaten into a form that supports this narrative will be newsworthy. The four page summary of the complete report, which Matthew Nordan kindly forwarded to me, divides nations into Dominant (USA, Japan, Germany and South Korea) – strong both in basic research and commercialisation, Ivory Tower (UK and France), strong in basic research but weaker in commercialisation, Niche Players (Israel, Singapore and Taiwan), weaker in basic research but strong in commercialisation of selected regions. China falls into the Minor League category, weak on both measures, and so not even in the top nine of nanotech powers. The report does suggest that China is moving strongly forward but there is no suggestion that it will overtake the current leaders. Nonetheless, it’s the China story that Lux’s public relations people chose to highlight, heading their press release “CHINA: MOVING FROM LAGGARD TO POWER PLAYER IN NANOTECHNOLOGY” (PDF). The story was obligingly picked up by Small Times, who headlined their story “CHINA MOVING UP IN NANO WORLD” and picked out the two measures on which China took second place (publications and government spend at purchasing power parity). This allowed Nanodot to headline its story “Claim: China is now #2 in nanotech”, which, as we now see, wasn’t the claim at all.