Category: Social and economic aspects of nanotechnology

Nanojury UK – the citizens’ jury on Nanotechnology that has been deliberating over the summer – delivered its verdict on Wednesday at an event in London. In full, there were twenty recommendations which attracted various degrees of support. But at the launch, four jurors attended in person, and they singled out four recommendations which they felt the whole jury felt most strongly about. After presenting these four key recommendations, they took questions from a large audience, and then the sponsors of the process gave their reactions.

The four recommendations were:
1. Health – nano-enabled medicines had big potential for reducing the time people spent in hospital. These should be developed via improved funding mechanisms and should be available without discrimination on the National Health Service.
2. The Government should support those nanotechnologies that bring jobs to the UK by investment in education, training and research.
3. Scientists should learn to communicate better – some of the jury felt sometimes patronised, they didn’t like all the long words scientists used, and scientists didn’t always agree with each other.
4. Products containing manufactured nanoparticles should be labelled in plain English.

The questions threw up some interesting insights. The most direct and straightforward came from the Guardian reporter – after this process, what was their general impression of nanotechnology. All four were in agreement; if safety could be assured, they were very positive. Another journalist asked them what they felt were the most exciting applications, and again they agreed on medicine and renewable energy. A Greenpeace person asked them a rather leading question about whether they would agree with the proposition that he claimed many scientists held, that if the public only understood the science they would support it. They answered this by saying that as they learned about the science, they got excited about it and talked about it to their friends. One juror told a story about how his daughter was at school and the class was asked about nanotechnology. She said “oh, yes, I know loads about nanotechnology”, to which the teacher replied along the lines of “how can you know about that, your dad’s just a taxi driver”, to which she was able to say that her father was taking part in this citizens jury and was telling her all about it.

One thing was absolutely clear – the jurors were tremendously positive about the process itself. They even managed to say some positive things about the scientists involved, despite conclusion 3. One juror rather accurately identified the problem with the upstream nature of the process – commenting that “some of this stuff is so far ahead that even the scientists aren’t sure where it is going”. This positive view chimed well with the independent evaluation made by Nick Pidgeon, a social scientist from UEA who assessed the ill-fated GM nation project. His view was also very positive, and he noted as good features the very representative jury, the very strong multi-stakeholder oversight panel, and the direct link into government. He noted as a challenge for upstream approach precisely the problem that the juror had pointed out.

From the sponsors, Mark Welland, from the Cambridge Nanotechnology IRC, talked a lot about the importance of the integrity of the process, and pronounced himself very satisfied with this. Doug Parr, from Greenpeace, sounded a slight air of disappointment. He didn’t think the recommendations reflected the richness of the discussions, he noted the importance of discussing, beyond pure technology, the wider issues of economics and the wider disconnects between science, government, industry and the public. He noted that there had been no mention of the idea of a moratorium on the new technology. I should note here, of course, that Jim Thomas, of the ETC group, which has been calling for a moratorium, was one of the witnesses and presented the case for one to the jury.

For the Government, the reaction was given by Adrian Butt, Chair of the Nanotechnology Issues Dialogue Group, the multi-department body set up to coordinate nanotechnology policy across government. He gave an explicit commitment to table the recommendations in the policy meetings of the NIDG and report back the outcome of discussions. He seemed really rather pleased with the outcome, which he took as being not far from endorsing the approach the government was taking. Nonetheless, he did exercise a certain amount of “expectations management” about how seriously the government would take this. In his words, “the results of this kind of exercise will not by themselves directly determine policy, but will provide social intelligence on the wider environment in which policy is made”

For nanobusiness, Barry Park, COO of Oxonica, expressed broad comfort with the balanced tone of the recommendations.

What of my personal recollections and feelings? I found it one of the most stressful things I’ve done in my career. I have massive admiration for Becky Willis, who chaired the oversight panel and kept the whole thing together in the face of what seemed at times overwhelming centrifugal forces (I composed one unsent resignation letter, and I suspect I wasn’t the only one who came close to walking out on the whole thing). The facilitators have immense power in this kind of exercise, and I ended up with immense respect for the professional effectiveness of Tom Wakeford and his team. But Tom has his own strong political views, which as he himself conceded in his own self-critique, he doesn’t always rigorously exclude from the process, and these aren’t calculated to make life easy for the scientists. It would be impossible for me not to take the criticisms of scientists communication skills personally, but I honestly don’t think the scientific witnesses should have done anything differently. I think the jurors got a very honest, unspun and unvarnished impression of the science, and in return I found the interactions with the jurors very rewarding.

At the end of it all, one thing that is disappointing was the very low level of press coverage – this perfunctory piece in the Guardian was the only thing in the nationals. There are some mitigating circumstances for the lack of press interest – the fact that the Guardian was the media sponsor limited the appeal for other papers, while the Guardian itself basically lost interest as a result of the decision to drop its weekly science section when the paper relaunched as a near-tabloid. But I can’t help feeling that there would have been a lot more coverage if the result had been different. There were approving words in an editorial in this weeks Nature (subscription required). Its conclusion is a good place to finish: “The results of the citizens’ jury suggest that nanotechnology is not perceived as a serious threat to the values of anyone but die-hard anti-technologists”.

The thinktank Demos has released another report on science and public engagement. The Public Value of Science is, in some ways, a follow up to their earlier pamphlet See-through Science. But whereas the earlier report was rather confident in its diagnosis of the failings of previous attempts to engage the public in science, and in its prescription of a new type of “upstream engagement”, the new report seems much more uncertain in its tone.

On the face of it, this is odd, because the news seems good. There is no evidence of any growing crisis in public confidence in science; on the contrary, the report quotes a recent opinion poll from the UK which found that “86 per cent of people think science ‘makes a good contribution to society’– up 5 per cent on two years ago.”. And the idea of “upstream engagement” is riding high in fashionability, both in government and among the scientific great and good. Nonetheless, there seems to be a nagging worry, a sense that this conversion to real public engagement is only skin deep. It’s true that there’s been some open opposition (for example from Lord Taverne’s organisation, Sense about Science) but this seems to worry Demos less than the feeling that all the attention paid to public engagement still amounts to little more than lip-service, leading to “a well-meaning, professionalised and busy field,propelled along by its own conferences and reports, but never quite impinging on fundamental practices,assumptions and cultures. “

I think they are quite right. The danger they have identified is that all this activity about public engagement still isn’t actually pulling the levers they need to operate to achieve their ambition, which is to steer the direction of the research enterprise itself. The next phase is to work on what they call the “software” of scientific engagement – “the codes,values and norms that govern scientific practice,but which are far harder to access and change.” This is a much more difficult matter than simply setting up a few focus groups and citizens’ juries. In essence, their aim here is to use the input from this kind of deliberative process to redefine the way the scientific community defines “good science”.

This kind of cultural shift isn’t entirely unprecedented. In fact, I’ve argued myself that the rise of nanoscience itself constitutes just such a shift; in this case the definition of good science swung away from testing theories and characterising materials, and towards making widgets or gizmos. But the process of change is difficult, unpredictable and hard to control. It’s not about the Minister for Science issuing a rational order to his obedient research councils; the process is probably closer to the way fashions spread among sub-teenagers. The editors of Nature and Science, like the editors of Smash Hits, might think they have some influence, but they’re at the mercy of the social dynamics of the playground. One obvious difficulty is that the values of the scientific enterprise are now highly globalized. All over the world scientists aspire to publish the same kinds of paper in the same journals, and to be invited to the same conferences. Another difficulty is the sheer self-confidence of the scientific community. Lord Broers’ Reith lectures captured the spirit exactly – paraphrasing Marx, scientists may concede that philosophers and social scientists have done something to understand the world, but scientists and technologists have a deep conviction that it is they who have changed it.

Moving to some more parochial issues, the report identifies some specific barriers that UK scientific politics puts in the way of their vision. The Research Assessment Exercise, which determines the level of baseline research funding in UK universities over a five year period, operates on a strictly disciplinary basis, using peer review of papers describing original research. There’s been some lip-service paid to the notion that there may be valid outputs that aren’t papers in Physical Review Letters, but I’m not sure many people are going to be willing to gamble on this, and I can’t disagree with Demos’s conclusion that ‘”it reinforces the model ofthe highly specialised researcher,locked in a cycle of publish-or-perish”. The research councils clearly see some of the problems and are starting some useful initiatives, but they’re hampered by the difficulty that the different councils have in working cooperatively. The big picture, though, is that there are precious few career incentives for scientists to divert their efforts in this way, and quite a few significant disincentives.

The big weakness in the Demos analysis, in my view, is its failure to address the issue of the power of the market. The authors are very equivocal about the growing emphasis on the commercialisation of university generated research. Agreeing that in principle this is a good thing, they nonetheless report ” growing disquiet among university scientists that the drive for ever closer ties with business is distorting research priorities”, and worry about the effects of this on the openness and integrity of the research process. All these are valid concerns, but what’s missing is a recognition that the market is now the predominant mechanism by which technology impacts on society. Demos says “We believe everyone should be able to make personal choices in their daily lives that contribute to the common good. “ The truth is, the way society is set up now what people buy is one of the major ways in which these choices are made. And the messages that people send through the market by these personal choices might well differ from the messages they would send if you asked them directly. If you ask a bunch of young people where they would like to see money spent to develop nanotechnology, they might well answer that they’d like to see it being spent on improving the environment and on ending world poverty, but then if they go and spend their money on iPods and personal care products their votes are effectively cast for quite different priorities.

This isn’t to say that the market is a very efficient way of setting research priorities – far from it. At the moment we have marketing and product development people making more or less informed guesses (which often turn out to be spectacularly inaccurate) about what people are going to want to buy. On the other hand, researchers are obliged to try and predict some kind of application for the outcome of their research when they apply for funding, and to do this they end up trying to guess, not so much what the potential markets might be, but what they think will best match the preconceptions of referees and research councils. Somehow the idea that in ten years everyone will want flexible television sets, or personal gene testing kits, or neutriceutical laden yoghourts, enters and spreads through the collective mind of the research community like a Pokemon craze. This isn’t to say that these ideas are necessarily wrong; it’s just that the process by which they gain currency is not particularly well controlled or evidence based. It’s this sort of process that sociologists of science ought to understand, but I’m not convinced they do.