There has been plenty of discussion from all quarters about how the UK failed to grasp the significance of nanotechnology, and instead spent years fretting over heath and safety implications. Without any real nanotechnology related activity in UK industry, worrying about the potential downside is like spending all your time planning what you will do if you win the lottery. But you have to be in it to win it.

The UKs Nanotechnology knowledge Transfer Network, the body charged with”accelerating innovation in nanoscale technologies” has contributed an article to Nanotechnology Nowlooking at responsible nanotechnology. There’s nothing wrong with it per se, it’s a good round up, but after ten years of dealing with every part of the UK government that touches on nanotechnology, from the Treasury to DEFRA (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) I can’t remember anyone extolling the potential economic benefits of nanotechnology, and it’s a real tragedy.

The UK has thousands of word class scientists beavering away on everything from graphene to cancer treatment and instead of being encouraged and aided to spin out their research into world-class companies, the government attitude is solely concerned with what might happen if someone “accidentally” inhaled a kilo of carbon nanotubes or managed to munch their way through a family sized bucket of fried chicken laced with quantum dots. It is probably why our rankings indicate that there is not too much difference between India and the UK as a place to commercialise nanotech.

While working on our report on Using Emerging Technologies to Address Global Risks, one of my favourite SciFi authors, Neal Stephenson, popped up with an essay on Innovation Starvation.

It echoes Tyler Cowen‘s arguments that all the easy big stuff has been done,  and that all we have left to look forward to are incremental improvements rather than world changing technologies.

Stephenson, being a science fiction writer, looks at space as an example where a culture of risk avoidance, cost cutting and politics combine to stifle innovation. As he points out, even China’s space program is merely copying what the USA and Soviet Union were doing 50 years ago rather than doing anything innovative.

It is undoubtedly a problem that plagues the world.  Whether it is large ambitious space programs, or providing a government stimulus for technology companies, the emphasis is always on avoiding failure, which involves avoiding anything innovative.  The million lost by a failed company always generates more headlines for governments than the hundred million successfully leveraged as we can see with the furore over Solyndra – although governments have a poor track record of picking winners.

So how can we kick start global innovation? As I argue in Using Emerging Technologies to Address Global Risks we need to focus on the big issues that we can all agree on. Water might be a good start.

Over the past five years I have come across numerous innovative approaches to water scarcity, from desalination plants that double as greenhouses to nanostructured membranes that dramatically cut the energy needed for desalination, but I cant remember a single one of them attracting significant investment. That wasn’t because the technology is poor, it is simply because of the costs involved in getting it to market put it outside the risk which any early stage investor would be comfortable with. Raising $50 million for social networking is relatively simple, but for water remediation it is a stretch too far. Development times in excess of 3 years and uncertainty about who will pay for the technology combine to make it almost unfundable.

For a small fraction of the current cost of dealing with drought – something that will only increase in the future – we could develop a suite of technologies to mitigate the shortage of potable water. But we won’t.

I’m not convinced by the innovation starvation argument, I think we have plenty of innovation but we lack the political will to deploy them.  The challenge isn’t so much stimulating innovation as effectively making the case for governments and international institutions to use it.

(Foreword to Using Emerging Technologies to Address Global Risks , October 2011)

This is a question that often comes up in our dealings with global policy makers who spend huge sums on scientific research while simultaneously being fearful of its consequences. Many believe that it is somehow important for the economy in an undefined and non-quantifiable manner, or that it is some kind of logical next step along the path that starts with scientific curiosity. Perhaps a better way of viewing technology would be as a mechanism through which science is applied to meet the needs of society, and that holds true whether the needs of society are getting rich quick, curing cancer, or both.

But there is another less beneficial view of technology. The idea that technology is responsible for environmental degradation, especially when coupled with population growth, is a powerful one that has held true since the industrial revolution. It is human nature to fondly imagine an agrarian pre-industrial utopia, while forgetting the regular plagues and famines that resulted in an average life expectancy of 35 years in pre-industrial Britain.  The idea that technology is a bad thing is a situation that has existed for much of the 20th century and persists into the 21st, partly as a result of confusion between technology itself and those individuals and corporations who control and exploit it.

But it is time for a change. In fact a change is inevitable. Human history is littered with technological advances that have changed everything, and much faster than anyone could have imagined.  The agricultural, industrial and information revolutions have resulted in massive changes to the economy, society and the way in which we interact with the environment.

Since the second world war, science and technology have moved faster and had a more profound impact on human society than at any other point in human history. We have moved from black and white television exploding onto the market in the early 1950s to more than 800 million people using Facebook within 60 years. While television took 3 decades to diffuse around the world, Facebook did it in 3 years. Technology has driven economic growth around the world and led to vast improvements in the quality of life for much of the global population, but it has come at a price: the rise of consumerism has resulted in environmental degradation on an unprecedented scale.

It is time to reappraise our relationship with technology and take control of its direction. With an increasing global population becoming ever more affluent, the pressure on resources coupled with climate change will inevitably lead to more wars, water shortages, famines and mass migration. Or will it?

If profound economic, societal and environmental changes are inevitable then why do we still address them in the same way we have for millennia, by being helplessly reactive? In the 21st century, science and technology has advanced to a stage where we can start taking control of the fruits of scientific progress rather than being powerless in the face of their development and exploitation.

We already have many of the technologies we need to address major global problems such as water shortages and disease, and there is no reason why inevitable environmental disasters such as oil spills still have to be tackled using antiquated technology when a hundred million dollars could give us the technologies to reduce the impact of oil spills to almost zero. Many other emerging technologies are being developed that would allow the world to support 10 billion people without compromising the tremendous growth in quality of life that has taken place over the last century.

At Cientifica we establish  how we can harness technologies for the global good. While we still lack the political will and necessary international institutions, we now have the knowledge and the tools to make the transition from being mere consumers of, and in some respect slaves to technology, to making use of  the new scientific revolution to mitigate and minimise global risks.

While it would be foolish to claim that the wise use of science and technology will usher in a utopian age, there is little doubt that we now have the tools to create a sustainable and responsible world where human suffering and environmental degradation can be alleviated while maintaining economic growth.

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?

Eyjafjallajokull Ash Particle Size Distribution

An interesting piece of work from Þröstur Þorsteinsson at the Nordic Volcanological centre looks at the particle size distribution from the Eyjafjallajokull eruption.

Thorvaldur Thordarson quoted in The Economist explains

Ash particles are normally in the 50-100 micron (0.05 to 0.1 millimetre) range. But at a site 50km east of the eruption, 24% of the ash falling to the ground was in the form of particles 10 microns or less in size. Studies of ash captured from the air show that for every one of the largest particles (about 300 microns) there are a million or more in the 2 micron range. So though the total volume of the eruption, put at about 0.14 cubic kilometres, is low, the amount of ash capable of travelling long distances is high.

While the measuring instruments only seem to go down to 2 microns or so, given the distribution profile it is a fair bet that Eyjafjallajokull is producing large amounts of nanoparticles. It would be good to see some more distribution data, perhaps using this type of instrument?

Since the UK’s new nanotechnology strategy was launched I have been either having a crash course in regenerative medicine or getting over a cold. In the meantime, my colleagues Andrew Maynard and Dexter Johnson have both taken a long hard look at the ‘strategy’ and found it wanting. No, I’m being kind, the general consensus is that it is total rubbish that makes the UK an international laughing stock. Why?

1. The entire strategy seems to have written by the kind of people who spend the first hour of a meeting explaining what to do in the event of an emergency, such as a leaky pen, and then don fluorescent jackets and hard hats to indemnify themselves the consequences of one of their number being hit by a meteorite. It’s all about public consultation, risk assessment and regulation, in fact anything that involves anything other than having meetings is excluded from the ‘strategy’.
2. The strategy seems to have been written by people too lazy to do any research. The evidence is damning as the report makes no reference to any of the previous UK nanotechnology strategy reports, and quotes entirely different numbers. Could it be that everyone on the comittee that produced this monstrosity was too dim to use Google, or simply too lazy?
3. The numbers just don’t add up. The report claims that “The global market in nano-enabled products is expected to grow from $2.3 billion in 2007 to $81 billion by 2015″ – a far cry from the also derided $2-3 trillion market numbers. I know that one of the organisations involved in this report spent a large amount of money for us to dig out the real numbers, and then apparently chucked it in a bin and grabbed the first thing they could find on the Internet instead. No wonder the UK has such a huge national debt!

I suspect the emphasis on talking rather than doing is because someone in BIS knows the true scale of the UK national debt and has realised that there won’t be any money available to implement anything anyway.  Let’s face it, in the six years since the RS report the entire UK nanotechnology strategy has involved the setting up of meetings, agencies, committees and public consultation so that we can worry about possible dangers and improve regulation. Meanwhile important areas, or indeed anything that works have been slashed, the UKs involvement in nanotechnology standards for example or the Nano & Me website.

Can we be absolutely clear? Spending six years calling for more discussion and setting up ever more steering groups to engage ever more stakeholders is not a strategy. Figuring out a way to move the excellent basic science in the UK into the economy would be, but this seem beyond the remit of this report.

Calling four government departments a bunch of dimwits probably won’t get us much work in the UK,  but the truth is that we don’t do any UK government consulting work. I was told by a senior civil servant at what was the Department for Trade and Industry back in 2002 that if they gave any work to Cientifica then the Institute of Nanotechnology would ‘go spare’ and as a result they were unable to work with or support either organisation. In the meantime we’ve developed strategies and dug out numbers for governments around the world, and despite being London based we have been roundly ignored by the UK Government who seem far more eager to promote anyone other than UK companies. Every UK nanotech report to date has excluded any data provided by UK companies. Even offers of free copies of our market research to government committees looking into various bits of nanotechnology provoke the same response as if we’d offered them a fresh dog turd wrapped in newspaper.

The real tragedy is that by publishing ridiculous documents like this it devalues the work of the entire science and business community. I know that there are some great people looking at nanotechnologies in BIS, in the TSB and of course Lord Drayson is no fool when it comes to science, but this seems to be a case where the whole is far, far less than the sum of its constituent parts.

There’s nothing like the mention of Geoengineering to get environmental groups even madder than putting a wasps nest down their trousers and beating them with a cricket bat, and for good reason. The idea that we could do something about climate change that didn’t involve re-engineering the political system would mean that we don’t have to live in caves, grow beards and ride bicycles. More annoyingly, some kind of techno fix would deprive some groups of a platform for the various other anti capitalist/globalisation/consumer agendas that have somehow got mixed up with sustainability.

Our old friends the ETC group, who spent the last ten years objecting to nanotechnology on rather questionable grounds, have reactivated their global network to write an open letter to “the upcoming privately organized meeting on geoengineering in Asilomar, California” which aims to look at a voluntary code “for the least harmful and lowest risk conduct of research and testing of proposed climate intervention and geoengineering technologies.”

What really gives the game away is their objection, or rather their outrage on behalf of a number of Philippines farmers groups, to the “almost exclusively white male scientists from industrialized countries” who will be at the conference.

Come on guys, why don’t you just come out and say that you are outraged by the lack of ethnic diversity in science, peeved about people making money out of it and hopping mad about not being seen as being important enough to be invited? What’s geoengineering, synthetic biology, nanotechnology or biotech got to do with it? Apparently absolutely nothing.

My esteemed (and allegedly cute) colleague Dexter Johnson comments on a number of recent nanoparticle toxicity projects and wonders what is the point of them. I’ve often asked the same question (and been asked to leave the room as a result), but there does seem to be a weird academic bias towards reviews and public consultation and I think I know why.

On several occasions when I’ve been in a bar with eminent toxicologists they have admitted that there is absolutely no way that we could ever understand the toxicology of every kind of nanoparticle, and there is no point in trying. What you can do is draw broad conclusions, so that if we have a high aspect ratio structure such as a long carbon nanotube we know that it won’t be cleared by an alveolar macrophage etc, and then we usually get into a discussion about whether anyone is ever likely to inhale enough of the stuff to have a problem, given that we treat most nanomaterials with rather more caution than we did asbestos.

So for most toxicologists the choice is clear. Get paid to do some science or sit about for a bit?

When toxicologists ask for a global well funded long term study to allow the modelling of the interaction of various categories of nanomaterials with the environment, the funding agencies can only manage rustle up a few hundred thousand euros for a two or three year project. That gets you nowhere in understanding a new and rapidly emerging class of materials, so we just end up paying great scientists to sit on their backsides and browse the web for a few years.

The European Union is to make the labelling of nanomaterials in cosmetics mandatory according to Chemistry World.

The cosmetic regulation states that all ingredients present in the product in the form of nanomaterials should be clearly indicated in the list of ingredients, by inserting the word ‘nano’ in brackets after the ingredient listing. The ruling defines nanomaterial as ‘an insoluble or biopersistant and intentionally manufactured material with one or more external dimensions, or an internal structure, on the scale from 1 to 100 nm’.

As always, the devil is in the details and the detail in question is the definition. While one of the advantages of nanotechnology is that it allows you to control very tightly the size range of the particles that you are creating, top down technologies such as milling and grinding tend to produce particles with a wide range of different sizes, and while the mean size may be above 100nm, that does not mean that there will not be any sub 100 nm particles present. I suppose the definition of ‘intentionally manufactured’ is also open to question.

I have seen a number of ads recently for ‘chemical free’ cosmetics – which once again depends on whether you class tea tree oil and water as chemicals or not, and nanoparticle free cosmetics are a similar oxymoron. Depending on the production method used, the mean particle size could have to be as large as gravel in order to be even 99% nanoparticle free.

Germany has adopted the EU proposals with the caveat that

the general mention on labels of nano-scale materials in cosmetic products using the term “nano” might be misunderstood by consumers as a warning.’

While labelling may assuage some of the regulatory concerns, will the average consumer would be any more concerned with labelling the nanoparticle containing ingredients than they are with currently permissible constituents. Grabbing a bottle at random from my wife’s dresser I find a long list of ingredients such as Methyl Glucech-20, PEG-12 Dimethicone, and Polyquaternium-4, and I can’t really see that putting Hydroxyethyl cellulose dimethyl diallylammonium chloride copolymer (nano), or (C₈H₁₆N)_x^.xCl^.(C₂H₆O₂)_x (nano) would make much difference compared with the power of the cosmetic company’s marketing machine.

And that’s before I get into another debate with a polymer chemist about whether or not polymers are nanotech!

I mentioned recently our work at Envision on the need to be able to rapidly distinguish between various strains of pathogens and how nanotechnology plays a part, but printable electronics plays a greater role than simply producing the detectors.

The beauty of being able to print devices is that costs become almost insignificant, so the critical semiconductor industry metric of yield, i.e. how many of the devices coming off the line are actually working, becomes insignificant. A wafer of microprocessors containing 800 chips retailing for $50 each is worth $40,000, and given the volume of processor manufactured, the effect of a a 2.5% improvement in yield of $1000/wafer soon stacks up. In contrast, printable electronics can produce devices for fractions of a cent (although nothing as complex as a microprocessor) and if these are retailing for a dollar the greater than 90% gross margins means that its not worth tweaking the system to get an improvement of a few percent in yield.

Talking to semiconductor industry people about plastic electronics often reaches an impasse with repeated demands to know what the expected yield of the process would be, and industry players often just not understanding the concept of yield not being significant when it is a measure that can make or lose millions of dollars a day for silicon based semiconductors.

But when we are talking about detecting swine flu (or Influenza (A) H1N1 as it has been re branded) one of the key issues is getting enough tests into the hands of the people who need them, and quickly. Changing a semiconductor process is costly and time consuming, because of the need to maintain high yields, whereas with the printed electronics solution, or at least the one we have, the device remains exactly the same whatever you are trying to detect, and it is only the antigen that needs to be changed whether we are looking for flu strains, bacteria or anything else.

Apart from the cost, which is always high on the agenda in any business, it is the flexibility of the approach which fascinates me. Whichever influenza strain we are looking for, only a small change in the antigen used needs to be made to produce a new detector. In fact, with the technology in its current state, a number of different antigens can be placed on the same chip, allowing positive identification of any one of a number of strains. So creating a new test, or opening up a new market only requires a minor tweak, rather than re engineering an entire process and losing sleep over small changes in yield.

A number of people asked about the possibility of re-recording the podcast of the talk I gave at Green Futures at the weekend as the quality is a bit patchy. It’s something I have been meaning to do for some time, as I can talk several orders of magnitude faster than I can type. I should also point out that this was a talk given to an audience with no knowledge of (or prior interest in) nanotechnologies so the more sophisticated among you may already know most of this.

Here’s my first attempt, not word for word but using the same notes so it may be the same thing in a slightly different order, so now you can do something more useful while listening to my mellifluous tones with a bit of added hiss. If I do this again I promise to buy a proper microphone!

Explaining the relevance of nanotechnology to the green community which is my latest attempt at public engagement.   My talk (and others, I’m on first) is available as a podcast here.

It’s surprisingly difficult to talk clearly to non technical and non business audiences but I gave it my best shot and almost managed to stay within my allotted ten minutes while covering

1. What is nanotechnology?
2. Key applications (from my point of view)
3. Health & Safety

Phew! Unfortunately there is no video so you can’t see my reaction to some of the statements made by the other speakers.

A recent poll by the UK charity the Mental Health Foundation found that 77% of people found the world more frightening than in 1999, and put some of the blame on the “worst-case-scenario language” sometimes used by politicians, pressure groups, businesses and public bodies.

It does seem to be true that to get any kind of (media) attention you have to conjure up an apocalyptic scenario in order to be heard. It permeates every area of life, at least in Britain, requiring the most implausible scenarios to be given equal attention to more mundane ones.

While setting up a recent retail venture I needed to rent a shop and get it spruced up. Normally one would think that getting a  few quotes from painters and decorators and choosing a  colour scheme would be enough to get things moving, but not any more. In a five page ‘pre-approval checklist” the landlord (a bank) requires a full and separate fire and health and safety assessments to be carried out before we can even start work.

This means paying a  few hundred pounds for a bloke with a  clipboard to come round to take a look, and then write an official report stating that in the event of a fire, shoppers should be evacuated through the front and back doors and should under no circumstances grab all the teaspoons and attempt to tunnel out via the basement.  The health and safety assessment will no doubt consider actions to be taken if a decorator falls off a ladder, mistakenly drinks a gallon of floor paint.

Hopefully the health and safety assessment of the health and safety assessor will have considered what course of action to take in the rather more likely event of getting a paint brush jammed up his backside by an angry builder.

Equally ludicrous is the fear that nanotechnology may be the next asbestos by a variety of lawyers and trade unionists in Australia who seem to have missed the debate we had on this four of five years ago. Public debate of nanotechnologies in Australia seems to involve a lot of shouting, swearing and storming out of meetings and we can now add attempting to terrify people with half truths to that mix.

Let’s be quite clear, carbon nanotubes are long thin filaments that have the potential to behave like asbestos in certain circumstances and depending on the length of the nanotube, but that is the only similarity, and a glance at a brief history of asbestos shows why, but here is a key difference.

When asbestos began to be widely used in the 1870′s there were no electron microscopes capable of understanding the structure of the material, it was simply some useful stuff. In the 1990′s when carbon nanotubes began to be analysed the appearance of long filaments led researchers to immediately question whether that material could behave likes asbestos and as a result huge amounts of money have been spent on environmental health and safety studies of nanomaterials ever since. Asbestos had been widely used for a hundred years before anyone thought about health and safety.

Even so, the risk posed by a material is related to its chances of a sufficient quantity of it being ingested, which is why asbestosis tended to affect people working with asbestos and producing air borne dust such as  miners, builders etc rather than people simply living in a building containing it.

But asbestos was widely used because it was cheap, whereas nanomaterials are phenomenally expensive. You would have to be crazy to build a roof with carbon nanotubes, it would be cheaper to use bricks made from compressed cocaine, and anyway it wouldn’t work. For most nanomaterials you have to mix them with something else, a polymer of a resin to form any kind of structure, otherwise all you have is a bag of dust, and once those materials are embedded in a composite it is highly unlikely that they will ever be inhaled.

This is a rather simplistic treatment of the whole nano safety issue, and for more in depth information SafeNano is a good place to start. I’d suggest all the lawyers sniffing fat fees from future class action suits and dreaming of running ads like the one below pop along to SafeNano too. I usually pay my lawyers on the understanding that they know what they are taking about, or at least can get expert advice. I certainly wouldn’t use a law firm that puts out scare stories and half truths to try to win business, isn’t that illegal?

“If you or a loved one has suffered from exposure to nanoparticles or other nanomaterials, you may qualify for damages or remedies that may be awarded in a possible class action lawsuit. Please click the link below to submit your complaint and we will have a lawyer review your Nanotechnology complaint.”

So when we look at any emerging technology, the 21st century situation is very different from that of the 1930′s. the last fifty years have seen huge advances in all sciences, from physics to toxicology, and the use if computing means that there is no reason for any researcher to be ignorant of anyone else’s results. Many of the mistakes made with materials in the past were due to ignorance of the structure of the material and its interaction with the environment. Now we have a huge array of tools to probe the structure of matter, and a massive and accessible body of knowledge of past mistakes to draw on, whether the toxic effects caused by the chirality of drug molecules or the structure of materials asbestosis, all available with a few clicks of a mouse.

There is really no need for anyone to be ignorant any more, scientists or lawyers.

Having spent a  few weeks looking at public engagement of science, and not being particularly impressed, a Nature article by ethicist Jens Clausen concerning Brain-Machine interfaces comes as a breath of fresh air. Unusually for an article on ethics, it deals with the facts and resists the temptation to imagine some kind of dystopian or utopian future which would throw up a whole slew of far more interesting and complex ethical issues.

Rather than getting worked up into a lather over the “Ethics of Killer Robots” (I’m not joking, this is a very serious issue for some members of one of the sub branches of nanofiction and I’m sure they’ll be in touch with me at some stage to castigate me for belittling them) Clausen concludes simply that

Brain–machine interfaces promise therapeutic benefit and should be pursued. Yes, the technologies pose ethical challenges, but these are conceptually similar to those that bioethicists have addressed for other realms of therapy. Ethics is well prepared to deal with the questions in parallel to and in cooperation with the neuroscientific research.

There, that solves the issue quite neatly, and hopefully we can all now get back to getting on with the future rather than worrying too much about the consequences of things that are yet to be invented, which is a pointless exercise. This is why.

James Burke had an interesting series in the 1970s called Connections which neatly explained how one technological breakthrough or societal change enabled another round of disruption. Now for us, looking back though history, it is quite obvious that the mechanisation of agriculture led to huge productivity improvements meaning that people could live in cities without starving to death and get on with things more interesting than tilling the soil, science, philosophy and literature for example. Now, what many of the public engagement projects attempt to do is to turn the process around and imagine what a piece of technology or science could grow into at some point in the future.

(As an aside, or perhaps a disclaimer, as an increasing part of my consultancy work is adding current trends to common sense via some rather complicated maths to put some well defined probabilities on various things occurring, I have to admit that not all futurologists are mad, or all technology predictions are fantastical.  However a disappointing number of predictions take a rather linear one dimensional view of technology and simply envisage ‘things’ being cheaper/faster/smaller without taking into account the way that ‘things’ are used or whether the underlying science will survive the quite extreme tests that both the free market and peer review will subject it to.)

Can anyone name a single case where any technology prediction over a period of more than ten years has been anywhere near correct? After all, shouldn’t we all have atomic powered flying cars by now and robot butlers. If I suggested that  it should have been possible to predict the invention of  mobile phones or the Internet on the basis of Michael Faraday‘s 1839 experiments most people would think I was barking mad, so it beats me why people think it rational that by observing a nanotechnologist fiddling about with a nanotube on a lab any conclusions about the effect of technology society and all its associated ethical baggage can be drawn.

Trying to predict what sort of societal changes that science will engender in ten or twenty years is pretty much totally impossible. Where I sit, in the middle of the City of London, most people will tell you, off the record and unfortunately over a beer these days rather than over a magnum of Krug, that really they don’t have a clue what will happen next week. So claiming to be able to predict the societal and ethical effects of a few bits of science is so ridiculous as to cause any reasonable sane person to suffer apoplexy at the thought of spending money on it.

And we thought the bankers were mad?

I spent the weekend discussing the various ways in which (nano)technology may be developed ‘responsibly’ which was, erm, quite interesting.  I have parenthesised the ‘nano’ as many of the fears weren’t particularly specific to anything nano, and I am still rather mystified by the various definitions of the word ‘responsible’  which I’m sure will keep the ethicists, philosophers and lexicographers busy for some time to come. I’ll return to this later.

While none of the fears voiced were particular novel, I was rather charmed by the innocent naiivety of the participants. The lay people, effectively people pulled off the streets with no knowledge of nanotechnology and then asked to bravely give an opinion on it, were perhaps the most open minded of the participants. During the course of the project they had been browsing the web, making up songs and producing plays about the perceived evils of nanotechnologies.  Despite all the time spent on Wikipedia learning about mind/machine interfaces were still willing to shake the hands of eminent nanotechnologists without any fear of being assimilated or contaminated by nanobots or nanoparticles.

As with most public engagement exercises, and there have been plenty, there was a realisation that technology is, in general, a good thing but can of course be used for a wide variety of purposes, not all of them beneficial to humanity. It was interesting that one of the fears is that we might slide into a kind of society which we don’t particularly want, but on the other hand I don’t remember much debate about the use of closed circuit TV, traffic cameras or councils popping  microchips in your dustbin, something that most people wouldn’t want but nonetheless are becoming increasingly commonplace, so perhaps it doesn’t matter what we want?  There were other fears raised as well, but the meeting reports will hopefully address these in a disinterested way and avoid the usual temptation to produce a report calling for things to be regulated/monitored/banned or have moratoria slapped upon them because that is what the people funding the project, in this case the EU, are perceived to want to hear.

What was almost shocking was the implied assumption, perhaps understandable among the lay people and but surprisingly also shared by the social scientists that because a scientist does something in a lab it will inevitably end up affecting society. It’s a little like assuming that everyone who picks up a pen to become Oscar Wilde, or anyone who picks up a guitar to inevitably become a rock star – nothing could be further from the truth and it was rather surprising that the whole process was based on the (false) assumption that science has any direct impact on society, because it usually doesn’t.

For any particular bit of science to have any impact is has to go through a number of gates and clamber over hurdles of ever increasing height and complexity. Science has its own checks and balances with publication and peer review, but most entrepreneurs will tell you that is almost trivial in comparison with actually getting that science onto the market, something that has to be done before it can have any effect. Let’s not forget that it was 1953 when the secrets of DNA were unravelled, yet genetic screening for more than a small number of diseases and characteristics is still prohibitively expensive. It was not the scientific discovery that changed society, but the development of methods of applying that knowledge, such as automated gene sequencing, and much of that was done in the commercial world.

Was it useful? Well perhaps from an intellectual point of view in the same way that an animated discussion over dinner, or even in a pub can be an interesting diversion. I also think it is useful for the science community to engage with the public and reflect on what we should be doing better to communicate what we do as well as how and why. What also struck me as rather odd, or perhaps just mind bogglingly stupid, was the idea of asking people who know about as much about nanotechnology as they do about credit default swaps to give an opinion on the subject to another bunch of people who also seemed to understood very little about the subject, especially as the project involved examining the link between two rather nebulous and undefined terms, ‘nanotechnology’ and ‘responsible.’  While I think I understand what is meant by nanotechnology, and even if the definitions used by other people may differ from mine we can at leat have a meaningful discussion, the idea of responsibility is inextricably bound up with ethics, which opens a whole new can or worms. Ethics aren’t something that can be defined, and are indeed a product of a number of things such as your political and religious views, your upbringing, the society you live in and your position in the society. As an example, someone in government planning may envisage a scenario where a certain number of civilian deaths is acceptable and see no real ethical problem, whereas the families of those civilians certainly would see a very big problem!

One of the jobs of social scientists is to wrestle with these poorly defined issues and find a way to tease out some patterns and perhaps draw some conclusions, but I’m unclear whether discussing ‘nanotechnology’ and ‘responsibility’ is any more useful than spending a few days discussing ‘walruses’ and ‘ice cream.’

My only involvement with social science was a couple of years of social geography, used as a sort of counterweight to the maths and physics at university, so what appears quite senseless to me may actually be something of great interest to a social scientist, and conversely what appears a rather fascinating and important financial instrument or bit of science to me may appear rather silly from another viewpoint and as a result I’m curious about what the the result of the exercise will be.

As far as I know, the result of all of this discussion will involve a short film and no doubt a lengthy report, but will there, or indeed can there ever be any conclusions or recommendations from this type of exercise?

I would like to elaborate more, but I have had  to be rather non specific as the organisers were rather put out by the idea of any of the information being garnered leaking out via twitter which apparently was ‘not on.’  A laptop displaying this page was rather peevishly produced to indicate that  if any hint of the top secret deliberations were to be emitted into cyberspace than ‘they’ would know about it and take some unspecified action. As every discussion was being digitally recorded and filmed, I was left wondering whether this was a contradiction that was only visible to me. Ironically one of the public fears most often voiced was that technology could lead to increased surveillance and a consequent loss of privacy!