The list of new and emerging technologies enabled by the convergence of nanotechnology, life sciences and information technology is one item longer today following the announcement from the University of Glasgow about inorganic biology.

The project head, Lee Cronin explains that “All life on earth is based on organic biology (i.e. carbon in the form of amino acids, nucleotides, and sugars etc) but the inorganic world is considered to be inanimate.

“What we are trying do is create self-replicating, evolving inorganic cells that would essentially be alive. You could call it inorganic biology.”

But professor Cronin has just used a number of phrases, perhaps intentionally, which will trigger yet another debate about playing God, worries about what happens when they escape from the lab and take over the world, and brings up the subject of responsible versus irresponsible innovation.

Whether developing a technology such as inorganic biology is classified as responsible or irresponsible depends as much on your ethical and religious views as it does on the science. The only sure thing is that the technology will be developed anyway once the genie is out of the bottle, and as with many other technologies we have to attempt to manage them in a way that gives us the best shot at producing beneficial effects.

Responsible innovation is something that seems to be trending, at least in Europe, as a way of ensuring that new and emerging technologies do not create any unpleasant side effects. To some extent it seems similar to the precautionary principle, which has been used as an argument against everything from GMO’s to nanotechnology, and can be used as an effective tool to sway political opinion against any new technology.

I would suggest, however, that thinking about responsible innovation should start only when technology reaches the stage of commercialisation, and that everything up to that point is just scientific curiosity. The howls of “what if science creates a monster?” have to be balanced against the progress that science has made over the past three hundred years, and while the products of science have not always been beneficial, we can live lives free of cholera and access whatever information we want whenever we want. It is impossible to see, from the lab bench, the final application of  any technology – neither the inventors of the transistor or science fiction writers predicted the mobile phone, and I can’t remember anyone in the dot.com era predicting Facebook or Twitter.

So responsible innovation should be something for companies to practice rather than scientists, just like open innovation. It’s an idea that fits nicely alongside the drift towards sustainability, shifting from the linear take-make-waste model that has been used ever since the industrial revolution to a more cyclical zero waste one enabled by life sciences. But the concept of responsible innovation needs more definition. Was the development nuclear weapons responsible innovation, as some would argue that they ended the Second World War and prevented a third one, or does their acquisition by rogue states such as North Korea render the whole field irresponsible? Was the development of polymers responsible, as it enabled huge advances in quality of life, or irresponsible as much of the plastic waste produced ends up in land fills or in the world’s oceans?

While industry is changing, and far more questions are being asked about safety and ethics than in the mid twentieth century, the idea of responsible innovation becomes far more dangerous in the hands of governments and regulatory bodies. An increasing number of publicly funded projects require applicants to answer all kinds of questions about the ethics and sustainability of the proposed research. Adding a fluffy ill defined term such as ‘responsible’ to the mix raises the risk of research being judged by personal rather than scientific criteria. It would certainly irresponsible to start demanding answers about responsibility too early, and before defining an end use or application of the technology, something that would risk putting the brakes on innovation and add to regulatory confusion. The use of nanotechnology in food, drugs or solar cells, for example, requires vastly different regulatory structures, even if the same nanomaterials are used for each application.

Is inorganic biology responsible or irresponsible innovation? It is way too early to answer that question, and we shouldn’t even try until we know what it will be used for. It may even prove to be a scientific dead end, and much of the debate about ethics, safety and regulation will end up as productive and relevant as the debate about ‘gray goo.’

Sometimes it’s good to take a step back and re evaluate what we are doing and why, something my good friend Doug Mather of the Creation Company has been urging people to do for years. It is very easy, whether in science or in business to develop myopia or tunnel vision, concentrating so hard on one particular task or goal that the rest of the world slips by almost unnoticed.

I find my release from the pressures of keeping up with science and running a number of businesses by hill walking – getting blown around on the top of Pen-y-Ghent or picking my way through the granite pillars of the Sierra de Guadarrama allows me to switch off from email and phone calls for long enough to ponder the big issues rather than picking through the daily list of to do’s.

Part of this big picture thinking led to the publication by the World Economic Forum yesterday of a new paper I authored with Andrew Maynard where we set out how we see the Role of Technology Innovation in an Increasingly Interdependent, Complex and Resource-constrained World.

You can download the full paper here, but in summary we are asking a very simple question – How can technology be best used to improve the lives of everyone on the planet?

While there have been some recent backlashes against technologies recently, and at many meetings of NGOs I attend there is some deep suspicion that technology is the result of  a sinister conspiracy by governments and businesses, technology has almost always been a force for good.

Obvious examples are the harnessing of fire, and the invention of agriculture, which started the transition of humans from hunter-gatherers to philosophers and Internet addicts. But perhaps the most startling transformation over the past fifty years has been in medicine, with many diseases that were killers being irradiated or, in the case of an increasing number, becoming chronic conditions.  One hundred years ago few people who went into an operating theatre came out alive, now it’s the vast majority.

But that is all in the past, and while we often think that technology is chugging along quite nicely as we browse Facebook on our iPads, we have to take that steep back and wonder whether technology is capable of addressing the big issues? Can an iPad help with meeting the energy demands of an increasingly wealthy world, or help avert wars over scarce resources such as water?

The vision that we set out in the paper is one where we take a longer term view of emerging technologies and their uses. To enable the increasing range of emerging technologies to be harnessed for good of everyone requires some new thinking about why and how we develop technologies, as we explain over at the World Economic Forum’s blog.

Through the work of the World Economic Forums Global Agenda Councils, we are developing and deepening inter linkages between emerging technologies and groups looking at other global issues, from climate change to innovation.  In the scientific community we are preaching to the converted, but it is now time to take the message to the politicians and business leaders, the people who make the real decisions.

I downloaded it from the freaking Internet and now I will destroy the world...

Discussing the Wikileaks revelations in the context of internet security this morning perhaps shows the trajectory that other emerging technologies will follow.

The Internet is not an emerging technology anymore, although many of its applications still are, but one of its key effects has been the shift of power from government and large organisations to the individual. Leaking hundreds of thousand of documents fifteen years ago would have required shifting and copying the contents of hundreds of thousands of manila folders, whereas now it just takes a few mouse clicks.

Similarly, technology innovation used to be the preserve of large organisations such as Bell Labs, IBM and Sony. While the dot com boom rewrote some of the rules, most other technologies still required labs and fabs (and billions of dollars of capital investment) to get to market.

But in 2010 we are seeing the beginning of a new era where smaller organisations are empowered by information technology, and the vast resources needed to synthesize and produce new materials can be increasingly replaced by modelling – and this is increasingly applying as much to life sciences as it does to the physical sciences.

As a result, technologies that required hundreds of people to develop can be produced by tens of people, and that number is falling all the time.

In the same way that Wikileaks has shifted the power away from governments and towards individuals, many other emerging technologies will follow the same path, allowing not just their development, but their proliferation too. All of this can occur ‘under the radar’ of existing regulatory frameworks, meaning that technology has the future potential to be as free and unregulated as information is today.

I spent some time in the ever fascinating city of Geneva this week for some meetings with the World Economic Forum where, as always, we are trying to figure out what to do about the world right now while trying to understand how the future will look – hopefully better than the present is the short answer!

One of the problems with predicting the future is that it is very easy to be horribly wrong. Predictions tend to fall into two camps, the incremental and the disruptive. The incremental view is that everything will continue along the current path while getting marginally better.  Following this path mobile phones were predicted to gradually shrink in size until they could be worn as wristwatches, but no one foresaw either the iPod/iPhone or text messaging.

On the disruptive side predictions involve huge shifts and changes, with for example manufacturing being replaced with nanotech and biotech, or, as every investor gets told by every entrepreneur, new products emerge which blow away all competition and disrupt the entire market.

While the first approach shows a lack of imagination, the second perhaps indicates a rather over active imagination, and the true path of the future lies somewhere in between – but not, I should caution, at some midway point.

This becomes important when I work with organisations on corporate technology strategies – how to keep an eye on the future and an option on potential disruptive technologies while maintaining growth in the current business and of course being able to respond to emerging opportunities? For many corporate people, the constraints of their organisation means that while they really do understand their business and markets inside out, they often end up either overspecialised, or over sensitive to internal business drivers that cause the bigger picture, and with it sometimes the bigger opportunities to be missed.

This became apparent when discussing the issues facing the chemical industry. Many resources are in increasingly short supply, and this may be political, such as rare earths, or structural, such as most metal ores where all the high quality ore has long been mined out. While there is a lot of discussion about how to manage resources, one of my major themes recently has been whether we can replace them?

This becomes crucial when you look at our dependence on resources. Lithium, for example, is a very abundant element, but only in a few areas such as Bolivia and Chile does it occur in sufficiently high concentrations to make the mining and processing of it for the lithium ion batteries that power the world economic. It only takes a bit of political instability or an earthquake to bring the world to a very sudden halt, as we saw with oil process in the 1970’s.

Nanotechnology and industrial biotechnology both have huge potential for replacing scarce resources, in the case of biofuels by moving to a second generation where the feedstock doesn’t require the replacement of food crops (or rainforest) with fuel crops, and in nanotechnology by creating entirely new materials. But in both cases, this is something we have to start doing now, rather than waiting for a crisis and expecting to be able to respond quickly enough.

So why were we discussing issues like this with the World Economic Forum? Simple, we’re in a bit of a mess at the moment, and with an extra 3 billion people on the way, all requiring food, land, houses, cars, healthcare, phones, laptops, energy and jobs we have a good idea what the problems will be. What we have to do now is start to imagine how we can stave off the worst effects of this huge and mounting pressure on resources without triggering waves of migration and war.

While the World Economic Forum is trying to create a Global Risk Response Mechanism, I argue that we need to create a system that will allow is to be proactive about risks. While technology cannot mitigate the effects of another banking crisis, and may indeed have contributed to it, we can make some large steps forward in addressing resources, health and climate change.

While accurately predicting the future is difficult, one of the biggest risks that we face, and one with implications far larger than the credit crunch, is not being ready for the future. In an increasing number of businesses and organisations that I work with are getting that message, but the real question is whether governments and policy makers will listen?

The Future of Science Funding?

I was chuckling at The Nanoclasts take on the new US proposals around the new “Golden Triangle” of nanotech, biotech and IT – they must have seen once of my presentations!

What the President’s Innovation and Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) wants to know is

What are the critical infrastructures that only government can help provide that are needed to enable creation of new biotechnology, nanotechnology, and information technology products and innovations that will lead to new jobs and greater GDP?

One has to wonder what the point is of convening a committee of experts, only to have them ask the general public? But in these dark days of science budget cuts, the Simon Cowell business model is beginning to look attractive. While Andrew Maynard is tied up in I’m A Scientist Get Me Out Of Here, answering questions about his salary and sex life, it’s far too tame for us. He should be made to eat kangaroo anuses washed down with a beaker of foaming green liquid, while running around yelling “Ah-Ha” if we want to be innovative about science funding.

It seems that everyone wants to do public engagement these days, holding meetings, setting up web sites, convening multi stakeholder dialogues, but they have it all back to front. It’s not the scientists who desperately want to communicate, it’s Joe Bloggs who wants to be heard, and if he’s perfectly well prepared to blow a pound on voting on Big Brother/Britain’s Got Talent/American Idol/Strictly Come Dancing etc then I’m pretty sure he’d be willing to shell out again to give his opinion on nanotechnology, synthetic biology or any other -ology that I could think of.

Understanding anything about the subject isn’t a prerequisite for having an opinion, as PITAC seem to have demonstrated.

Just think how much extra research funding could be generated if scientists had to compete for research funding on live TV, with the audience voting by SMS or phone lines? 19 Entertainment, the company behind American Idol made $233 last year, and that would fund a lot of science. Imagine if EPSRC started doing it, we’d have nanotech labs and synchotrons on every street corner by the end of the decade.

So there’s the solution to the science budget. More public engagement, more wild hair, lots of foaming liquids, and no need to bother the hard pressed Government.

I spent last weekend in a rather hot Doha (Qatar), surrounded by Emirs, Queens, Princes and Prime Ministers at the World Economic Forums Global Redesign Initiative meeting. It’s an organization I have been involved with for the past six years, through both the Technology Pioneers program and the Global Redesign Initiative.

As the world changes at an ever increasing pace, with new challenges from the financial, technology and natural worlds coming thick and fast, there have been questions over whether international institutions, from the United Nationals to the International Monetary Fund are able to cope.

“Today’s institutions are organized to solve yesterday’s problems” – Mark Malloch Brown, World Economic Forum Global Redesign Meeting, Doha, May 2010

A large part of the change, from the time when most institutions were set up in the aftermath of the second word war has been the explosive growth in communication. When the UN was founded television was only available to a very few people, whereas in 2010 almost five billion people have access to the Internet. The proliferation of Internet enabled devices from iPhones to sensors and the expanding use of social networking such as Twitter and Facebook would have been unimaginable even thirty years ago when the Internet was still an emerging technology.

But technology can present a hazard as well as a risk. While presenting many opportunities that benefit the planet such as raising awareness of global issues and encouraging international cooperation, the Internet can also be used for identity theft and spreading pornography, or even challenging the legitimacy and authority of governments.

With all emerging technologies to date, from the Internet to genetically modified organisms (GMOs), the understanding of the implications by governments and international institutions has lagged way behind the deployment of the technology.

The same is true for the emerging technologies of the 21^st Century. Nanotechnologies, synthetic biology and geoengineering have undoubted potential for good, especially in proactively addressing the issues which will inevitably arise in a world where nine billion people face increasing competition for resources, from food and water to power and natural resources. But equally inevitable is the potential for misuse, from home brew bioterrorism to environmental pollution, and in the case of geoengineering the potential for global disaster even though technologies may have been deployed with the best of intentions.

These emerging technologies, and their inter-linkages with civil society have the potential to shape and reshape our world even more profoundly than the Internet, and the ease of access to information and computing power means that in the 21^st century world changing breakthroughs are as likely to come from the mind of student as from a large multinational corporation.

The reactive nature of institutions is inherent in their nature, and we are proposing the creation of a mechanism to support faster, more fact based decision-making, and to provide the knowledge which would enable a proactive approach to be taken to both the risks and the opportunities arising from 21^st Century emerging technologies.

The full proposal for the Centre for Emerging Technology Intelligence is contained in the WEFs Global Redesign Initiative report, and you can also download a copy here.

I’m happy to say that the idea is receiving increasingly strong support from both Governments and companies who are increasingly realizing that in today’s world, taking a passive and reactive approach to global issues will be always more expensive than developing risk avoidance technologies in advance.

You can see (and hear) more about the WEF Global Redesign Initiative below

Kristin Alford who was also at last weeks SMO Cleantech Confernce has a thought provoking piece on anti trends, inspired by Stefan Hajkowicz’s overview of Megatrends which I discussed yesterday.

It’s an theory I can agree with – just because there is a trend doesn’t mean that everyone will go along with it, and the anti trends can sometimes have more impact than the trends themselves, punk rock and organic food being two recent examples. While mega trends are global, the effect of anti trends becomes magnified as we get down to more local levels. Anyway, back to CSIROs megatrends and Kristin’s anti-trends…

Megatrend 1: More from Less – A world of limited and depleting resources with increasing demand for those resources through economic growth and increases in population. A need to focus on resource use efficiency.

Anti-trend 1: Less from Less – A world of limited resources and depleting resources, with demand for those resources slowing as people appreciate these limitations. People are turning to multi-functional devices, reusable items and buying experiences and therefore require less products.

Megatrend 2: A Personal Touch – personalisation of products and services. Growth of the services sector of western economies is being followed by a second wave of innovation aimed at tailoring and targeting services.

Anti-trend 2: Reducing Choice – A backlash against too much choice. People shop at ALDI, make choices between only two suppliers (eg Mac or PC) and look for ways of simplifying decision-making.

Megatrend 3: Divergent Demographics – OECD countries are ageing and experiencing lifestyle and diet related health problems. The developing and underdeveloped worlds show high fertility rates and food scarcity.

Anti-trend 3: Growing Global Health – Improved treatments for chronic diseases lead to longer lifespans with better health outcomes. Education and application of technologies within local values in developing world also improve health outcomes and slow fertility growth.

Megatrend 4: On the move – Move to cities and people are increasingly mobile, changing jobs and careers more often, moving house more often, commuting further and travelling more often.

Anti-trend 4: Fulfilment – Young people are urged to follow passions, which lead to a range of jobs, but some consistency in career. New online technologies deliver improved face to face opportunities for connection, leading to less travel.

Megatrend 5: iWorld – digital and natural convergence. Everything in the natural world will have a digital counterpart. Computing power and memory storage are improving rapidly. Many more devices are getting connected to the internet.

Anti-trend 5: Opting out – Not everything will have a digital shadow if sections of the community are able to opt-out.

Thought provoking stuff, and also an alternative way at looking at investment opportunities. While much of venture capital goes into ‘me too’ investments such as solar, biofuels, social media, which drives up valuations and invariably ends in disappointment for most investors, spotting the opportunities in anti trends gives smart investors a way to leverage niche opportunities at low cost.

Most investment decisions are based on following a consensus view of the future, and while maverick anti trends are high risk, they also have the potential for much higher rewards.

A Better Choice For Emerging Technologies?

I had a chat today with a US colleague who complained that all the journalistic attempts to derail nanotech just drive any commercial benefits of US research into the hands of the Russians & Chinese.

Is that a price worth paying for democracy? Certainly my colleagues in more, ahem, regulated economies are quite happy to give up a small amount of freedom now for staggering economic growth and future prosperity, as I suppose was the US during the Cold War.

Given that commercialising any emerging technology requires a 15 year plan,which could involve three elections, are western style democracies at a disadvantage to ones which can make longer term strategic plans? If you can stand on the shoulders of giants, which is the more important factor, individual creativity or long term objectives?

Abolish Science Now!

As an adjunct to my previous post, Science today reports on a new report from the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies (The Impact of Genetically Engineered Crops on Farm Sustainability in the United States) which seems to conclude that biotech crops are good for farmers and the environment, with the usual caveats and uncertainties of course.

So fourteen years after the press and environmental groups declared GMOs to be bad, we now find that they are, in general, quite good in both environmental and economic terms. It’s a reasonable time lag, and I think we’ll see something similar for nanotech, synthetic biology and most other emerging technologies. However the meme that GMO’s are bad is so well entrenched that it may take another ten years and a lot more science to reverse it.

And this gets to the nub of the issue between science and society. Any anti technology movement, from smashing up Spinning Jennies to ripping up GMO crops or disrupting nanotechnology meetings takes as long for scientific evidence to overcome as it does to win the peace in the Malay Peninsula or Iraq.

In the meantime, how many people have to die from preventable diseases such as vitamin deficiencies or malnutrition that science could have cured?

Stop that talk of nanobots, this is getting silly!

The UK Ministry of Defence released its latest ‘Global Strategic Trends – Out to 2040‘ study last month, and it’s a good read (even for non spooks) covering everything from terrorism to to climate change and their impact on geopolitics.

The report identifies four key issues, Globalisation, Climate Change, Global Inequality & Innovation which will dominate the next thirty years. The first three are fairly obvious, but I liked the rather rational approach to innovation which seems to put the military at odds with much of the ‘Cleantech industry.’

Innovation and technology will continue to facilitate change. Energy efficient technologies will become available, although a breakthrough in alternative forms of energy that reduces dependency on hydrocarbons is unlikely. The most significant innovations are likely to involve sensors, electro-optics and materials. Application of nano-technologies, whether through materials or devices, will become pervasive and diverse, particularly in synthetic reproduction, novel power sources, and health care. Improvements in health care, for those who can afford it, are likely to significantly enhance longevity and quality of life.

For those interested in how the military see nanotechnologies, there is a specific mention:

Nanotechnology focuses on manipulating matter at the atomic and molecular scale, generally at less than 100 nanometres in size. At this size, and using other scientific disciplines, the characteristics of matter can be changed. This will create new and unique properties with profound and diverse applications. Advances in nanotechnology, at the interdisciplinary frontier where physics, chemistry and biology meet, will be a key enabler of technological advance, involving: new additives and coatings; materials and sensor development; and medical treatments and heath diagnosis. Products will be smaller and more energy efficient. They will be designed and manufactured with atomic precision and less production waste. Out to 2020, defence applications, in convergence with other disciplines, are likely to be predominantly in sensors, electro-optics and materials, including biologically active agents and surface- engineered materials. Additionally, integrated nano-devices will lead to the emergence of small, swarmed and autonomous systems. The application of nanotechnologies, whether through materials or devices, will become pervasive and diverse, particularly in manufacturing (strong lightweight materials for transportation applications), synthetic reproduction, novel power (battery) sources and health care (targeted drug delivery and augmented medical treatments).

Much of it is sensible, but the term ‘synthetic reproduction’ pops up a few times, perhaps a hangover from the old nanobot days when planners envisaged hordes of nanobots devouring enemy tanks?

The recent news about the debt problems in Dubai contrast with the glitzy no expense spared hotels and conference centres where I spent last weekend with the World Economic Forum, but probably do more to highlight the importance of a diverse technology enabled economy than any amount of lobbying we could do.

While Dubai has led the way for the emergence of the Gulf as a major economic centre, most of my technology work has been done in the neighbouring states, Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Saudi Arabia who, while perhaps being slightly envious of Dubai’s dash to pre eminence in the region with the worlds tallest tower and an indoor ski slope have been taking a more measured approach to development. Most of these countries have been playing the property game too, but also backing this up with major investments in science and technology, and that doesn’t just mean taking stakes in AMD or IBM but making sure that technology fits into the local economy.

The reasons to do this are all the more obvious this week, and in a region with tiny but fast expending populations, ensuring that jobs are created for locals rather than overseas labourers is of increasing importance. It is estimated that Saudi Arabia has 25% youth unemployment, and in a country where 40% of the population is under 15 the petrochemical industry isn’t going to provide all the jobs that will be needed to prevent social unrest.

What is? Increasing the size of the manufacturing sector is a key policy goal in many states, and Mubadala, one of Abu Dhabi’s investment agencies has already announced plans to build an AMD fab in the emirate but this is only the start. The longer term goal, and the financial and political situation in many of the the Gulf states allows the luxury of long term planning, is to develop new technology based industries in materials, aerospace, semiconductors, renewable energy and pharmaceuticals but based on a whole host of new and emerging technologies such as nanotech, industrial biotech and regenerative medicine.

While Dubai may in the eye of a storm right now, the longer term prospects for the region look as bright as the desert sun.

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.

One has to be amazed at the chutzpah of the collection of dimwits and dullards who put this document together. Not only did it take three years and hundreds of thousands of Euros of our money to put together, it’s also complete rubbish! I’m at a loss to figure out what sort of cretins spend their days spinning out a sentence into to chapter with no logic, structure, or any indeed indication that the writer had the barest grasp of the English language. It’s not just bad English, it’s the kind of stuff that nincompoops in fluorescent jackets grind out, hiding behind big words and tripping over complex structures to hide their ignorance. In fact it reads as though 95% of it was written by a monkey with an electronic dictionary. I defy anyone to read through this kind of drivel and retain their sanity.  One can only assume they get paid by the word.

So, the DEEPEN Project apparently spent three years gauging public attitudes to nanotechnologies without making any effort to understand what nanotechnology actually is, as they freely admit

In sum, the DEEPEN project has found that current efforts in ‘responsible development’ – whether in ethical analysis, public engagement, or new forms of governance – while impressive, are still dominated by limited and limiting modes of thought. They will require reconfiguration in order to fulfil the promise of socially responsible nanotechnology.

otherwise how on earth could they have come up with this bizarre representation of nanotechnologies.

The research found that public responses to nanotechnology can be understood as being structured by five key cultural narratives, each of which represent archetypal stories deeply embedded in European culture. These are: ‘Be careful what you wish for’; ‘Opening Pandora’s box’; ‘Messing with nature’; ‘Kept in the dark’; and ‘The rich get richer and the poor get poorer’.

As I was involved in a part of the project, I can report that these were the responses of the people who were running the project.  The ‘public’ quite liked ‘nano’ and became less concerned about it as they spent more time with nanoscientists and less time with hand wringing social scientists, much to their increasing chagrin.

So, after three years and all that effort, what’s the conclusion?

What the DEEPEN project has achieved and the research that needs to be done became visible only through a deliberate combination of approaches. On the one hand, DEEPEN conducted a kind of opinion research with advanced methods of public engagement and discourse analysis – such as are suitable to the EC-funded ‘coordinating and support actions’ which are concerned with the quality of communication between research, policy, and European publics. On the other hand, for purposes of analysis and understanding, this research was related to theoretical traditions and perspectives from philosophy, social science, and political theory. The preceding analysis demonstrates that it is one thing to elicit the ethical intuitions or standard repertoires of stakeholders, publics, or policy makers and quite another to identify the challenges posed by emerging nanotechnologies. As it turns out, the intuitions that are brought to the table by most stakeholders and concerned publics reflect assumptions about emerging technologies that are being challenged by the nanotechnological programs and visions. Where our intuitions begin to fail us as a guide in ethical and political matters, what is required first of all is improved understanding. We would be heading down the wrong path, therefore, if DEEPEN were to have been the last EC-funded research project in this are

In other words we found out nothing except that it would have been more useful if we’d had some idea what nanotechnology was before we started, so can Brussels send us some more money to do it again?

Now don’t get me wrong, I think public engagement is a fantastic thing, it makes us as scientists question our motivation, and of course its good for the general public too. However it’s this kind of sloppy and pointless work that gives all public engagement a bad name.

Part of the problem in engaging the general public about science is widespread scientific illiteracy. It doesn’t help when the UK Government doesn’t seem to have a clue what science is! According to this report

The Government now includes as “science”, courses such as nutrition and complementary medicine, geography studies, sports science, nursing and psychology, even though in dozens of universities it is classed as an arts degree.

So we’ve come down to making up numbers as we go along? If that wasn’t bad enough, what, we wonder, counts as being scientifically literate at the age of 16 in the UK?

One question in a recent science paper asked “why is wireless technology useful?” – the correct answer was: “no wiring is needed”.

Nature published an interesting paper at the weekend, a Canadian meta study into public attitudes to nanotechnology. The key finding is that “those who perceive greater benefits outnumber those who perceive greater risks by 3 to 1.” That’s probably not too surprising, as the majority of press stories about nanotechnology tend to be along the lines of it curing cancer or making things better and/or more useful, but it’s nice to have some confirmation of this.

Michael Todd has some more thoughts on this, with the usual headline that the results are ‘surprising’ – I’m not sure that they are.

The researchers also found that “a large minority of those surveyed (44%) is unsure” – which once again correlates with my London based experience which suggests that around 50% of people who work in electrical superstores or man call centres don;t have a clue what they are talking about, but manage to form an opinion nonetheless (the exception to this rule seems to be builders and plumbers merchants who not only know exactly what they are talking about but show Herculean patience when dealing with lesser mortals.)

In a nutshell then, people don’t mind nanotechnology, or any other technology too much if they perceive that it will have a positive impact on their daily lives, and will put up with a modicum of risk in order to enjoy the benefits. A bit like a chicken crossing the road then.

As expected, Jonathan Miller’s talk reflecting on “the biology of design didn’t disappoint, and was a object lesson in science communication. As a non biologist (my background is mainly physics, materials, surface science, music and finance) I found it fascinating, informative and quite inspiring.

As Miller is a celebrated theatre director, scientist, author and a host of other things, the question of ‘Two Cultures‘ was raised from the audience. Miller’s reply was simply that it’s all simply curiosity about how things work, and argued that there isn’t really any philosophical distinction between examining and trying to understand how a cell works or doing the same with a piece of theatre, music or art. The problem, he argued lies with the education system, forcing pupils at an early age to make a choice between the gentlemanly pursuits of the Classics or “making a stink in test tubes” – a choice which determines the rest of our lives.

Miller’s solution to bridging the gap was unusual – simply start talking about philosophy with children from an early age, asking questions such as what is the difference between waving at someone and stretching – as in both cases your arm moves. Discussing things in this way will encourage all manner of scientific, medical, and philosophical enquiry and Hey Presto! your kids will become polymaths.

Well, sort of, as there is a natural predisposition to certain subjects, and Miller admissted that mathematics was never his strongest suit so the mathematical parts of the life sciences such as molecular biology were a little fuzzy to him.

I’ll try the Miller technique on my children, and see if we get them to go from bellowing “I’m Michael Winner and I want My Dinner!” to “I’m Jonathan Miller and I want to know why!”