The antagonist de jour, of course, is China. Rapidly building advanced energy plant, grid, and end-use infrastructure that will outclass their creaky U.S. counterparts, the Asian giant, remarked Chu, is winning the “energy race.” Worse, more and more Americans worry that China is on the verge of surpassing the United States in science-and-technology innovation, even though the authoritarian nation faces a host of problems in its own innovation ecosystem.

Secretary Chu’s prescription? Increased federal investment in “scientific R&D.” In short: Remember the Sputnik moment.

Aerospace history has become a stock American folk syllogism recalling a fall from, and challenging a return to, grace. If we can put men on the moon, surely we can build a better mousetrap, or close the gap in the energy race. But is the problem really a crisis of American innovation?

If so, it does not stem from a lack of trying. Nuclear and photovoltaic power are American inventions, fuel cells were first made practicable in this country, and, for a time, electric cars and hydrogen power seemed just around the corner. The last 40 years have witnessed booms and busts in all of these systems. Yet American researchers do not appear to be running short of new ideas, as research in high-efficiency batteries, polymer photovoltaic systems, and artificial photosynthesis shows.

The issue instead seems to be the relationship between innovation and national industrial recovery and job creation. To the energy secretary, the broader federal science-and-technology policy establishment, and legions of private-sector R&D contractors, innovation policies and industrial policies are virtually one and the same. China, held Chu, had progressed industrially by taking a page from the U.S. playbook, using the state as a “slight rudder” to guide the private sector in taking the dominant role in R&D.

Actually, the Chinese government does quite a bit more to shape its energy economy than simply keeping a light hand on the tiller of national R&D. In fairness to Chu, he might have found those sorts of issues beyond his purview. Department of Energy Science Undersecretary Steven E. Koonin was a bit more forthcoming about the relationship between science, technology, and industry in an address at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in January 2010. He pointed out that change occurs much faster in IT than in the power source industry partly because it is physically less difficult to shift bytes than molecules, but also because in the United States there has been a disjunction between academic research and commercial manufacturing in the latter sector.

Koonin did not elaborate, but the reasons for this gap stem from the deep-seated belief of U.S. policymakers that government-supported science and technology can supplant regulation and planning in stimulating industrial growth. As it emerged after the Second World War, federal science-and-technology policy attempted to reconcile statism with free-market principles. This hybrid approach—call it American-style quasi-planning—assumed that the private sector and government had similar interests and, hence, that government-sponsored advanced science and technology could simply be injected into the economy much like a vaccine, with near-immediate salutary effects.

“Partners” in name only

This approach worked well in certain sectors, particularly in cases when the government was the sole or major customer for certain novel and otherwise unobtainable products that it asked industry to produce. In these cases it could bolster existing industries such as aviation and help incubate new ones such as electronics that readily spun off technologies into the civilian market without seriously disrupting existing interest groups. Business and state interests also meshed in the established fossil-fuel-based energy and ground transportation systems, with the federal government funding development of the interstate freeway system and prosecuting policies that secured plentiful supplies of cheap crude oil.

Where power sources were concerned, however, these interests frequently clashed for a mix of physical, political, and economic reasons. During the zenith of the Cold War, the federal government promoted work on photovoltaic cells, fuel cells, hydrogen, and nuclear power for special-purpose military and semimilitary roles. It also encouraged civilian applications of these technologies, largely, as in the case of nuclear power, for reasons of prestige and national security. But this was not easy and manufacturers had no strong incentive to try owing to the abundance of primary energy sources of various types in this period. They had to be plied with generous subsidies and even then they were not always enthusiastic.

Such conflicting imperatives were no better illustrated than in the Clinton administration’s Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles, or PNGV. Styled by Vice President Al Gore as the automotive equivalent of the Apollo project, this cost-shared program in automobile R&D was initiated by the federal government on the false premise that automakers would welcome its efforts to encourage the modernization of the industrial base and increase fleet fuel efficiency through advanced systems like hybrid and fuel cell electric drive as politically acceptable alternatives to higher CAFE standards. The idea was to encourage voluntarism as an alternative to regulation, which Detroit regarded as forced technological change. But American manufacturers did not brook even this minimal interference in their affairs. They chose not to commercialize the supercar demonstrators they produced with government assistance and successfully resisted California’s efforts to legislate battery electric power.

Nor were American consumers then much interested in the new technologies, preferring massive, relatively unsophisticated gas guzzlers with improved safety features. But they changed their minds after Toyota and Honda introduced the hybrid electric passenger car in the early 2000s and the price of fuel skyrocketed around mid-decade. Belatedly, U.S. carmakers realized alterative products could be profitable, yet they lacked the capacity to produce them cost-effectively. The episode was something of a comedy of errors. In the 1990s Detroit spurned the mild medicine offered by the paternal hand of the state, only to collapse, atrophied, into the arms of government after a decade of brutal competition in the 2000s.

Nanotechnology: An energy revolution on the cheap?

So is nanotechnology the answer? A form of materials research emerging in the 1990s, nanotechnology was touted as another free-market solution to our energy problems. Its advocates believed that special nanoscale materials could make batteries, fuel cells, and photovoltaic cells cheaper, more durable, and more powerful by exploiting the high surface area and quantum properties of existing substances produced as nanoscale particulates and novel materials like carbon nanotubes and quantum dots.

Accordingly, an initial nudge by the federal government in the form of a relatively small R&D investment was expected to spawn a special materials industry that in turn would “self-assemble” (a favorite rhetorical flourish of nano-advocates drawn from utopian visions of molecular engineering) an industrial revolution on the cheap. Thus would the social and environmental collateral damage that had always attended such events in the past, and hence the need for government regulation, be obviated. The lobbying of nano-advocates prompted the Clinton administration to establish the National Nanotechnology Initiative, or NNI, in 2000.

Such assumptions cocked skeptical eyebrows in some parts of the science community but were generally tolerated, at least in quarters dependent on federal cash, if only because of worries of the effects of criticism on the money flow. Today there are a number of U.S. startup companies engaged in commercial development of nanomaterial-enabled power source technologies, including Konarka, a maker of organic photovoltaics, and battery component manufacturers Envia and Nanosys.

Probably the best known is Massachusetts-based A123. Its lithium-ion rechargeable battery uses nanostructured iron-phosphate electrodes to achieve what many observers regard as superior performance. Supported at every stage of its growth by the Department of Energy, A123 would, if successful, become the first American company to compete in the global market for rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, one U.S. battery makers dabbled in but then abandoned in the early 1990s, when it amounted to only a few hundred million dollars. Today it is worth anywhere from $10 billion to $14 billion.

In the mid-2000s A123 set its sights on electric automobility, potentially the richest market of all, collaborating with General Motors in developing the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid. The denouement revealed the paradoxes and limits of nanotechnology. Ultimately, GM selected South Korea’s LG Chem Ltd. to supply the Volt battery for a number of reasons that probably boiled down to a belief that its lithium manganese spinel technology, parts of which contained materials developed by the DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, posed fewer manufacturing and operating unknowns than A123’s more radical design.

The deal, which helped set up LG Chem in this emerging sector, will see batteries produced overseas until the firm opens a U.S. factory in 2012. Its manufacturing base hitherto located in Asia, A123 opened its first American plant in September 2010 using stimulus money intended to attract battery industry to the United States. For the time being, the company must make do servicing niche markets.

In essence, the various branches of the U.S. state worked at cross-purposes. With one hand, the DOE stood up a promising American company that was promptly punished for its inexperience by an auto company part-owned by the U.S. taxpayer; with the other, it indirectly helped a foreign company profit by the first American mass-produced hybrid electric passenger auto.

The battle of the electric automobile batteries is only the latest example of the hazards of quasi-planning. Tasked by the Obama administration to stimulate a job-rich sustainable energy industry, the DOE can conceive and gestate firms but is ill-equipped to bring them to maturity. It has virtually no power to alter industrial relations in the domestic market, much less in the global economy, especially the odd, asymmetrical system of codependency evolved by the United States and China that incentivizes American manufacturers to relocate abroad to exploit cheap labor in producing goods destined for the U.S. market but largely bars them from competing in the host country.

As A123 founder and MIT professor Yet-Ming Chiang explained to me at the Nanotechnology Innovation Summit last December, at a certain point in his company’s growth, the issue became one of industrial policy as much as research and development. Asian automakers, he remarked, would never dream of using batteries not produced in their home countries. An industrial pioneer brought to, but not yet quite over, the threshold of success, A123 faces challenging years ahead.

This tableau highlighted the complexities and contradictions of basing the revivification of one ailing heavy industry (automobile) on another (electrochemical energy storage) that was even more moribund. In a sense, given these complexities, the decisions of GM and the DOE were rational. The quickest way for American manufacturers to access advanced battery technology on an industrial scale was to ally with those foreign firms with advanced battery-manufacturing capabilities. If the objective of industrial rejuvenation is jobs, as U.S. politicians frequently claim, the strategic dependency that will result from such arrangements is less of a problem (where it involves staunch friends like South Korea and Japan) than the fact that much of the economic benefits are likely to remain abroad.

So while great strides have been made in nanotechnology, it is no free-market elixir. As a compound neologism, wrote former National Science Foundation chief Neal Lane in 2001, nanotechnology expressed, in a general sense, both current basic research (nano) and deep-future application (technology). But there has been a programmatic gulf between the two within the DOE. The third-most important federal sponsor of nanoscale science, engineering, and technology, or NSET, DOE has contributed $2.14 billion of the $12 billion spent thus far in the National Nanotechnology Initiative. Most of this has been spent through the DOE’s Office of Basic Energy Science, work conducted separately from the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and its Industrial Technologies Program. Here, far less—only about $7 million in 2009—has been devoted to nanomanufacturing, although this figure is set to triple by the end of fiscal year 2011.

To be sure, this cleavage will probably have little immediate effect on long-term projects like the DOE’s ambitious effort in artificial photosynthesis, which aims to develop cheap single-crystal silicon nanowire semiconductors coated with cheap earth-abundant nanoscale metal catalysts to produce hydrogen and oxygen from sunlight and water. Researchers hope such systems can meet an expected doubling of current annual global energy consumption of around 15 terawatts by midcentury.

Last July the DOE’s Office of Science launched the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, investing $122 million in a Caltech-led partnership under the banner of Secretary Chu’s new “Energy Innovation Hubs” initiative. Berkeley Lab Director Paul Alivisatos opined that such work requires sustained support rather than a “pulse of money” and then stepping back to see the results, as has happened in other science fields in the past. And there are serious engineering, organizational, and economic issues entailed in building the auxiliary systems of a hydrogen economy that go far beyond the scope of the DOE.

Conclusion

So what of the “Sputnik moment” and Chu’s formula for America’s energy calculus? This crisis is not a discrete, galvanizing event amenable to a quick fix, but part of a broader historical process of adapting an economy based largely on the technology and social relations of the previous century to rapidly changing circumstances in the new one. One can’t fault the secretary for demanding more money for “scientific R&D.” We expect him to do that as chief of an agency dedicated to such activities. But “scientific R&D” and the patents that are its proximate product cannot by themselves form the basis of national recovery because the great ideas that inform technological innovation and industrial manufacturing, like, say, giant magnetoresistance or lithium manganese spinel energy storage, can originate anywhere in the world (France, Germany, and South Africa, respectively). The historian David Edgerton has long argued this point, one recently illustrated by W. Patrick McCray in his history of the commercialization of giant magnetoresistance.

And so it is unrealistic to shoulder the DOE with the lion’s share of the burden of easing energy innovations into the marketplace. True, there is a long record of and justification for federal intervention in the American economy. But students of history might point out that if U.S. business and government leaders were serious about creating millions of new high-tech jobs in green energy, they would augment science and technology policies by protecting manufacturing. After all, they would only be playing by rules followed by all countries in achieving industrial liftoff, including Japan, China, and, back in the day, Britain and the United States of America.

There are, however, no easy answers. Up to 60 percent of Chinese exports to the United States are actually produced by American companies. Yet some form of protection combined with long-term federal countercyclical spending are likely the most effective ways to spur a national energy renaissance. Of course, such options aren’t likely to be pursued anytime soon. In the United States, the chief instrument of industrial policy appears to devolve from currency manipulation. Encouraged by the Obama administration, the Federal Reserve has maintained interest rates near zero and flooded the market with cheap credit, resulting in a decline in the value of the dollar that some believe will allow the United States to export its way out of the recession. Given the understandable reluctance of Asian governments to open their markets any more than necessary, this seems wishful thinking.

In America’s current political climate, boosting science spending will be far cheaper and simpler than dealing with such complexities. For that reason, it will likely be the default response in the energy race.

Matthew N. Eisler is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. SES 0531184 and SES 0938099. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Further reading

Jay Inslee and Bracken Hendricks, Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean-Energy Economy (Washington: Island Press, 2008).

David A. Kirsch, The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000).

Neal Lane, “The Grand Challenges of Nanotechnology,” Journal of Nanoparticle Research 3 (2001): 95–103.

Gijs Mom, The Electric Vehicle: Technology and Expectations In the Automobile Age (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

Bruce Podobnik, Global Energy Shifts: Fostering Sustainability in a Turbulent Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).

Reuters, “LG Chem sees more battery orders for GM’s Volt in 2011,” November 13, 2010, available at http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6AD00220101114.

Joseph J. Romm, Hell and High Water: Global Warming – the Solution and the Politics – and What We Should Do (New York: William Morrow, 2007).

Richard H. Schallenberg, Bottled Energy: Electrical Engineering and the Evolution of Chemical Energy Storage (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1982).

Some dismiss Ray Kurzweil as a quack. His predictions of a future sound like plotlines from the nuttiest sci-fi films. According to Kurzweil’s theories, by around 2029 information technology will become more sophisticated than the human brain, and by 2045 what he calls “the Singularity” will occur—information technology will have advanced to the point at which people can become immortal by downloading their consciousness onto nanobots, which can race around the world and infuse other bodies or inanimate objects with human consciousness.

Kooky sounding indeed. Last week, however, at the D.C. premiere of ‘Transcendent Man,’ hundreds of people gathered to hear Ray Kurzweil and see a documentary about him and his theories. While this may sound more like science fiction than actual science, the man did invent the musical synthesizer, created a device that uses optical character recognition to help blind people read, predicted the year and month in which a computer would defeat a human at chess, and has 17 Ph.Ds. Kurzweil has even received the National Medal of Technology, the highest medal the president can bestow for pioneering new technologies, from three separate U.S. presidents. So let’s not dismiss him just yet.

Kurzweil has studied the progression of information technology since the dawn of time, noticing that the rate of technological innovation tends to proceed in an exponential fashion. Based on Moore’s Law, named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, Kurzweil’s studies find that the capacity and speed of information technology has doubled about every two years and he believes it will continue to do so. Adding to this, Kurzweil notes how many industries, from retail to genomic medicine to manufacturing, are beginning to function more and more like information technologies.

For example, scientists working in labs across the world can email whole genomes back and forth, and then “print” them out using ever-cheaper, ever-faster DNA sequencers. With the rise of 3D printing, Kurzweil asserts that the day is not far off when one can simply download a blouse or a solar panel from the Internet and “print” it out at home. With exponentially accelerating information technology influencing innovation in so many fields, Kurzweil posits that technological advancement will accelerate at asymptotic speeds, so fast that the human mind will be incapable of understanding it.

But Kurzweil’s theory is centered around the human relationship to technology only. It is unclear how these speculative technological changes would affect the human relationship to nature. If nanobots will be able to repair our bodies from within so that humans do not have to age or get sick or get fat or starve, does it even matter if global warming and environmental degradation destroys ecosystems and warms our planet to the point of disrupted food chains and massive environmental disasters?

When I spoke with Kurzweil last week, I asked him about this, specifically how climate change and the environment fits into his theory. (You can hear the whole interview at the link here.) He responded that stopping climate change matters because many millions of people will suffer if we don’t. He continued:

I have a whole thesis on resources. … it’s really only these exponentially growing information technologies that have a scale to address problems like energy and the environment. … right now solar energy is actually a half of a percent of the world’s energy but it’s doubling every two years and has been for 20 years, so it’s only eight doublings away … which is 16 years, from meeting 100 percent of the world’s energy needs. … do we have enough sunlight to do that? Yes, we have 10,000 times more than we need.

Kurzweil’s theories are rooted in a fierce optimism. For him technology is the answer to the world’s most difficult challenges, namely suffering and death, and as demonstrated by his answers to my questions, climate change and environmental degradation. But his rhetoric and discussion are maybe too optimistic and too easy. He is concerned with the what, namely what happened with technology development in the past and what will happen in the future. But he glosses over the how. It is precisely the how that we need to concentrate on now.

Technology will not just double itself. As Bracken Hendricks and I have written in a report on clean energy deployment for the Center for American Progress:

It is critical to remember that Moore’s Law is not a law of physics. It is a law of markets. Capturing this opportunity to make clean technology cheap requires a clear assessment of the real barriers in the market today. … the combined public and private investments [in communications technology, for instance] created tremendous public value while giving birth to a brand new industry. Predictability in the market made this possible. That is just what is missing for clean energy today.

Like Moore’s Law, Kurzweil’s concept of exponential technological development is not a law of physics. I am also optimistic about the potential of clean technology but it will not develop in a vacuum. If technology is to solve our energy and climate problems, it will require massive amounts of capital from the private and public sectors to accelerate innovation and scale up clean energy deployment. This is why the United States needs a concerted and cohesive clean technology innovation policy effort that provides policy incentives to help clean energy projects attract private investment.

We must pick up where Kurzweil’s theory leaves off and look into the mechanics of how public policy can be used to build an American economy that runs on clean energy. This means enacting policies to eliminate market barriers that prevent clean energy technologies from competing fairly with incumbent fossil technology, and ending perverse subsidies for ancient, outdated, and environmentally destructive industries like coal and oil. You can read a more detailed list of policy proposals to accelerate clean energy deployment in a Center for American Progress report, “Cutting the Cost of Clean Energy 1.0.”

We live in a time in which premature deaths are accelerated by pollution and environmental degradation, and global climate change threatens the very future of all mankind. If these trends continue, we face a potentially dismal future. It may be a stretch to say technology innovation alone will solve these problems. Kurzweil is right, however, in that our ability to use clean technology will be crucial to solving climate change and our energy challenges, and will relieve many millions of people of suffering along the way.

Kurzweil’s vision for the future reminds us that, unhampered by market externalities, regulatory barriers, and competition from the entrenched infrastructure of the past, the clean energy economy has the potential to grow exponentially and meet our needs. With the right policy incentives, Kurzweil’s unrelenting optimism should inspire us to believe that a future free of climate change and fossil-fuel addiction is well within our reach.

Lisbeth Kaufman is Special Assistant for Energy Policy at the Center for American Progress and co-author of the report, “Cutting the Cost of Clean Energy 1.0.” A version of this article also appears on Pluck Magazine, a great new online magazine featuring young adult voices on the changing of culture, society, and career paths in the 21st century.

Just imagine, materials with 10 times the strength of steel and only a fraction of the weight; shrinking all the information at the Library of Congress into a device the size of a sugar cube; detecting cancerous tumors that are only a few cells in size. Some of these research goals will take 20 or more years to achieve. But that is why…there is such a critical role for the federal government.

As the NNI enters its second decade, a broad appraisal of the federal investment in nanotechnology is called for. Rather than frame this is as a matter of success and failure, let’s consider the new issues and concerns that have arisen since 2000. The effects of large-scale R&D investment can unfold in surprising ways and the NNI is no different.

A few key lessons are clear. The NNI helped advance research on the process of innovation itself; it demonstrated the uncertain consequences of overselling the novelty of new technologies; and it expanded our understanding of the environmental consequences and social impacts of emerging technologies.

But first, some backstory. Original plans for the NNI aimed to direct some $495 million to expand research at the nanoscale. Eight agencies—the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, NASA, and the Departments of Commerce, Defense, Energy, Transportation, and Treasury—had representatives listed in early reports. The proposed return on this investment included broad areas of new research targeted for interagency funding and a national infrastructure with “centers of excellence” where nano-researchers would work with the stated goal of producing new discoveries to be “rapidly commercialized by industry.” The new initiative also aimed to “promote a new generation of skilled workers…necessary for rapid progress in nanotechnology.”

Clinton’s plan maintained broad bi-partisan support even after he left office. In 2003, Congress passed the 21^st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act, which authorized spending $3.7 billion over the next four years, $2.9 billion of which was actually appropriated. Overall, the U.S. investment in nanoscale R&D over the last decade is close to $12 billion (annual private sector investment worldwide is even greater, according to a 2008 Congressional Research Service report). A decade later, some 25 federal agencies are part of the NNI and 13 of these have their own nano R&D budgets. The President’s FY 2011 budget request for the NNI totals $1.76 billion spread across 14 agencies.

The NNI emerged at a salient point in United States history. In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, economic competitiveness replaced the twilight military struggle of the Cold War, and science advocates could no longer claim national defense as the prime rationale for funding basic research. Lawmakers were still struggling to adapt national policies to the new global environment and to the implications of the increasing commercialization of science. Advocates of the NNI proposed it at a propitious time—between the end of the Cold War and a renewed preoccupation with national security after September 11, 2001—when lawmakers were trying to reshape national science and technology policy. It exists now in an economic and political climate vastly different from that when President Clinton stood at that podium in Pasadena in 2000.

Against this backdrop, we can consider several important and unexpected lessons learned from ten years of policy supporting nanotech research—lessons that are not specific to the tiny particles under consideration, but are important for science policymaking going forward in many fields.

Appreciating Innovation

When policymakers proposed the NNI, politicians expressed enthusiasm that it would make the United States more economically competitive. Forecasts, not from intemperate prognosticators but sober-minded science managers, predicted that the international market for nano-goods would be $1 trillion by 2015. The production of these goods, supporters said, would require a new high-tech (and highly paid) workforce of some two million people, potentially leading to a major restructuring of the global workforce.[1]

In 2000, no one of course could have predicted a decade that included the debilitating effects of a massive domestic terrorism incident, two major overseas conflicts, and the worst economic downturn since 1929. With unemployment drifting just under 10 percent and the global economy still in disarray, it would be churlish to ask “where are all the nano jobs?” So let’s look at it another way. The NNI was never just about “technology.” It was also a form of industrial policy, forming part of a hidden developmental state in which federal investment helps underwrite new commercial technologies. The NNI has also created a vast national research infrastructure for nanoscale R&D. Some of this infrastructure was built on institutions, practices, and organizations that pre-dated the NNI. In 1985, for example, the NSF started establishing Engineering Research Centers to coordinate academic research and industrial needs. After 2000, the NNI created dozens of new research facilities out of whole cloth. The end result is that there are now 60 major centers and facilities across the United States. This is analogous to NASA’s creation of national R&D network in the United States during the 1960s to support space-related research, but more extensive in scope and aims.

Just as noteworthy is the fact that the number of federal agencies that have joined the NNI has grown significantly since 2000. Also worth noting— many “nano and society” researchers have focused on understanding how innovation happens and how it moves out into the public sector, resulting in jobs, new businesses, and so forth. Researchers at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at University of California, Santa Barbara have considered both the historical and contemporary aspects of nanoscale innovation in both the U.S. and China. For example, in the 1990s, a basic physics discovery—giant magnetoresistance—made in European laboratories proved essential for American electronics firms such as IBM. Without this innovation, today’s ubiquitous memory-intensive devices such as iPods would not exist.[2]

Researchers have used a variety of means to understand this process. However, it is important not to focus simply on the numbers of patents, publications, or scientists trained, etc. While universities and funding agencies might like to think that innovation can be quantified so simply, focusing too much on one number can also have unintended (and undesirable) consequences. Innovation is an activity with historical, social, and economic dimensions and it must be studied in ways that reflect this so as to better understand and aid the process.

The Novelty of Nano?

The policymaker’s definition of nanotechnology—“understanding and control of matter at dimensions between approximately 1 and 100 nanometers, where unique phenomena enable novel applications…imaging, measuring, modeling, and manipulating matter at this length scale”—belies the fact that a great deal of R&D that might seem “nano” now, existed for years, if not, decades, before the NNI. It had its own research communities, professional groups, conferences, and so on. Moreover, the United States wasn’t the first nation to have a national nanoscale research program. Efforts, smaller in scale, funding, and ambition, existed in Japan and the U.K, for instance, in the 1980s. This does by no means devalue the NNI, but it’s important to realize that it is a continuation of older, more established R&D programs in disciplines like materials science, physics, and chemistry. This is analogous to the idea that the microelectronics R&D community was already three decades old when the SEMATECH consortium, a government-industry partnership formed to foster greater competiveness, was formed in the mid-1980s.

Given nanotech’s long history, it isn’t surprising that most of the past decade’s scientific and technical accomplishments have been incremental and evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. The focus on newness (which policymakers, scientists, and the media all contributed to) can also have blowback, creating a “novelty trap” (to use Steve Rayner’s term) of unrealistic expectations and heightened concerns on the public’s part.

The lesson here is three-fold. One is that the public has come to expect continuing technological “revolution,” an expectation that belies the actual nature of technological change, which is often incremental rather than revolutionary. Also, the dominant focus on newness elides the fact that a great deal of innovation doesn’t come from the realm of inventions and patents but from use (a point made in David Edgerton’s book The Shock of the Old). Finally, policymakers should be more wary of the “innovation trap” in which a new technology is promoted as a panacea for current problems (i.e. here, geoengineering or synthetic biology could join nanotechnology) without consideration of new problems or drawbacks that may accompany it.

Environmental Issues

When scientists and policymakers were building the foundation for the NNI in 1998 and 1999, they paid attention to the environmental issues involved. But the focus was primarily on how nanotechnology could help improve the environment with cleaner water and more efficient energy use. However, by the time the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology did its first review of the NNI in 2005, new issues and concerns had cropped up.

Within a fairly short span of time, policymakers began to ask if the government was adequately addressing the potential environmental or health risks that might accompany the scientific advances the NNI was underwriting. Environmental groups issued a variety reports on nanotech expressing optimistic caution (Greenpeace) or proposing an outright moratorium on research (the ETC Group). In 2005, the Woodrow Wilson Center launched its Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies to “ensure that as nanotechnologies advance, possible risks are minimized” and national media coverage started to frame nanotech R&D as a matter of environmental risks versus economic benefits. Research dollars followed these concerns—in 2008, the NSF funded two major new national centers to consider the environmental implications of nanotechnologies.

Again, this is not a negative outcome—attention to potential implications reflects a positive example of trying to apply anticipatory governance to emerging technologies. But this was an unexpected change from what scientists and policymakers were most focused on a decade earlier. Moreover, scientific research on environmental and health issues has been more than simply “defensive” as one might have expected. Policymakers and scientists alike should be pleased that these studies have produced broader knowledge of the overall interactions between, for example, carbon nanotubes and biological systems. This new knowledge in turn could produce desired yet unexpected outcomes such as commercial innovations.

Studying (Nano)technology and Society

The NNI moved early to integrate the study of “ethical, legal…and other appropriate societal concerns” into its framework. The NSF funded two national centers to study these implications (one at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the another at Arizona State) and all of the NSF’s “Nanoscale Science and Engineering Centers” have some sort of “nano and society” component. Nano, of course, was not the first major national technology endeavor to propose studying societal, ethical, or legal implications.

In the 1960s, NASA spent millions to study the social and economic effects of the space program, giving rise to the agency’s “technological spinoff” reports. And, in the 1990s, the Human Genome Project established its Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications, or ELSI, program. The NNI’s approach to the question of social implications has been different and, I believe, more innovative. Rather than having researchers study societal questions from the margins, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and economists were integrated into the nano-enterprise early on. In many cases, they have worked in close proximity with bench scientists and engineers, helping demonstrate to those groups to how “we” do our research. The idea of considering the societal implications in concert with the actual R&D is far-sighted and original. When successful, such efforts have encouraged scientists and engineers to consider the societal implications of their research from the outset.

At UC Santa Barbara, for example, we have a long-standing program that recruits graduate students from the sciences and engineering disciplines and engages them in actual social science research. As a result, they return to their labs with a sense that doing good research means not just good bench science but also taking into consideration the social, environmental, and economic implications of their work.

These interactions have the potential to change the ways in which these experts communicate with various publics about science and, at the same time, can help scientists formulate a better understanding of the ordinary citizen’s perception of risks and benefits. Another unexpected outcome is that a growing international and interdisciplinary community of experts has formed with its own conferences and other scholarly apparatuses. This body of experts, many of them starting their careers, will be primed to address the implications inherent in future new technologies.

W. Patrick McCray is a professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a researcher and former co-director of the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at UCSB. He is also a member of the Science Progress advisory board. This article is based upon research supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. SES 0531184. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Notes

[1] M.C. Roco, “International Strategy for Nanotechnology Research and Development,” Journal of Nanoparticle Research (2001) 3, 5-6: 353-60; “Will Small Be Beautiful? Making Policies for Our Nanotech Future,” History and Technology (2005) 21, 2: 177-203.

[2] W. Patrick McCray, “From Lab to iPod: A Story of Discovery and Commercialization in the Post-Cold War Era,” Technology and Culture (2009) 50, 1: 58-81.

To explore these ethical approaches to emerging technologies Science Progress spoke with Gregory E. Kaebnick, editor of the Hastings Center Report and principal investigator on the Center’s “Ethical Issues in Synthetic Biology” project, and Andrew Light, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. Because the field is advancing so rapidly, scientists, ethicists, and policymakers must address the social and ethical issues now, as it still matures, argue Kaenick’s colleagues, the authors of the new study. (To listen to the podcast of our conversation, see the audio player in the sidebar, download the mp3, or subscribe via iTunes.)

Synthetic biology, commonly referred to as “synbio,” is not one particular technology, but “more of an agenda” to use existing scientific tools to do rather than simply understand biological science, Kaebnick explained. Synbiologists “create and modify biological parts and organisms” using “a confluence of a variety of technologies” including DNA synthesis, information processing, and DNA sequencing, he said. The techniques can yield medicines, fuel, and industrial chemicals. Moreover, Light added that synbio shares many important concepts and jargon with information technology. Synthesizing DNA, for instance, is analogous in some ways to programming a machine to make it perform a specific task.

But what about the potential benefits promised by emerging technologies like synthetic biology and nanotech? One likely benefit, Light explained, may come from the intersection of nano and synbio energy research. Scientists in multiple U.S. labs are working to develop artificial photosynthesis, a process in which engineered cells turn water, sunlight, and carbon into biofuel. Light pointed to this as an important area of renewable energy research because it could help harness the 800 terawatts of solar energy striking the Earth at any given moment and transform it into useable resources. “This is at least one reason why I think we could see a big benefit if this technology develops in a responsible way,” he said.

Another important advance is in the artificial production of artemisinic acid, the precursor for artemisinin, an effective treatment for drug-resistant malaria. Kaebnick called it the “poster child for synbio,” as natural wormwood sources for the compound are expensive and rare.

Despite these potential benefits, synbio raises a number of concerns. One of the greatest risks is bioterrorism, Kaebnick said, as DNA synthesis techniques could be used to reproduce a variety of pathogens. For example, with the appropriate gene sequences, rogue scientists could recreate the polio virus or smallpox. They could even re-engineer smallpox so it is more deadly than the original disease, he explained.

Bioterrorism is a clear potential physical harm. In contrast, potential nonphysical harms present philosophical questions that range from “Are we over stepping our bounds as humans?” by engineering artificial life forms to “Who should have access to life-extending drugs?”

For example, Light suggested, if scientists develop a drug that radically extends the human lifespan, it may not be immediately accessible to the whole population although there would be “enormous pressure to invest in this technology,” he said.

A similar concern is creating whole organisms with synthetic DNA, Kaebnick said. Environmental preservation champions who believe “we ought to preserve biodiversity and rare organisms” even if it is “economically disadvantageous” to oppose such synbio research. He went on: “Down the road, we may have the ability to control our children’s development in utero,” using emerging technologies. Ethical issues in this area of synbio are similar to existing concerns raised by assisted reproductive technologies.

A number of regulations are already in place for synbio, Kaebnick said, as rules for biotechnology often spill over to technologies used in synbio. Regulations enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Agriculture, and other federal agencies may apply to emerging technologies as well, he explained. However, Light said there are still gaps left when considering synbio research, and due diligence will be necessary to prevent their exploitation. “The attitude is not to keep synbio from happening,” he said, but rather to create and maintain public confidence in its benefits.

Interview produced by Andrew Plemmons Pratt, managing editor for Science Progress, and Vivian Cheng, intern with Science Progress.

Nanotech contains some elements of recent vintage, but much of the nanotech enterprise is continuous with long-standing trends in science and engineering.

Historical context can and should inform policy decisions in more subtle ways than just providing a toolkit of questionable analogies. To make the case for historically-informed policy, we draw on our experiences researching the history of nanotechnology. This might appear to be a strange topic. As our colleagues ask sometimes, how can we study something that is so new or, to make matters worse, hasn’t even happened yet? Certainly, nanotechnology has yet to unfold in anything like the manner President Bill Clinton predicted when he committed the federal government to a major nanotech initiative in January 2000. Back then, policymakers imagined that nanotechnology would be the key driving force for the 21^st century economy—much the same rhetoric we hear for green technologies today.

The cognitive dissonance created when we say we are studying the history of nanotechnology is amusing, but also dangerous. Nanotech contains some elements of recent vintage, but much of the nanotech enterprise is continuous with long-standing trends in science and engineering. The inability to recognize or acknowledge nano’s continuities can lead to obfuscation. As with many “miracle technologies,” both nano’s proponents and critics want it both ways in terms of novelty. For supporters, it is new, revolutionary, the next big thing, etc.—until you start talking about regulation, at which point advocates, particularly in industry, say something like “oh, it’s just molecules, we’ve known how to handle those for a hundred years.” Critics try to stir up passions about a new, scary, untried technology—but then they also want to picture nano as a continuation of a conspiracy by wealthy corporations in the West to exploit the little guy and threaten our environment. Indeed, some of the high-profile critics of nano, such as the ETC Group, started out as anti-biotech organizations and have recycled many of their critiques with “nano” replacing “bio.” We don’t want to imply that a sophisticated history of nano could adjudicate these uses of novelty, but if a properly informed history entered public discourse it would encourage supporters and critics to use more subtle arguments.

We research nanotechnology partly because it was the last “miracle technology” to appear—preceding green technologies, but coming after the Internet, biotech, the alternative energy bubble of the ’70s, nuclear power, cybernetics, and so on. Understanding how these come into being, why they (and not others) come to be perceived as miraculous, and how successfully they meet initial expectations will help us understand new miracle technologies as they appear.

The advocates of miracle technologies package plenty of folk history into their advocacy, such as “nanotechnology will succeed like biotech, if only we encourage the same academic start-ups that fueled biotech,” or “nanotech will be as world-changing as nuclear power or genetically-modified organisms, so we should try to defuse the public resistance that befell those technologies.” Unfortunately, advocates’ histories of nano often don’t support the weight placed on them. For instance, nano advocates often cite Richard Feynman’s 1959 speech “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” as the origin of nanotechnology, without mentioning that the speech was widely ignored until it was resurrected in the 1990s to give nano an intellectual pedigree. Or, advocates often claim that all nanotechnology was enabled by the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope, or STM, in the 1980s. But this narrative neglects the long incubation of nano in the ’80s and ’90s, when the pioneering figures were either oddball, sci-fi-inspired futurists or grant officers slogging through the bureaucratic infighting needed to create the National Nanotechnology Initiative—features of nano history that advocates apparently feel will tarnish nano’s halo.

We beg to differ—we feel that telling the history of nano in all its occasionally seedy detail makes this important technology more human and approachable. Understanding the grand arc of this history will be increasingly important in ensuring that the emerging debates about nano’s environmental, health, and safety dimensions capture the complexities of the issues, rather than boiling everything down to cartoonish dichotomies.

Even the term “nanotechnology”—coined in 1974—turns out to have a complex, and telling, history.

Let us give two examples of where our long arc of history departs from a schematic advocates’ history. First, as mentioned, many people claim nano is new because we now have instruments like the STM that can “see” individual atoms and therefore can do lots of new things at the nanoscale. But scientists have been able to image individual atoms since the late ’50s. Nanotechnology has been made possible as much by long-term improvements in old instruments like electron and optical microscopes as by the invention of sexy new instruments like the STM. As David Edgerton has written in The Shock of the Old, advocates’ focus on the novelty of high-tech makes sense for advocacy—but it skews the public policy debate.

Second, even the term “nanotechnology”—coined in 1974—turns out to have a complex, and telling, history. One of the great achievements of the NNI has been to encourage the growth of a series of coordinated, interdisciplinary, academic nanocenters. Yet several of those institutions are (and most are modeled on) institutions that have existed since the mid ’70s. At the time, those organizations had “micro” or “sub-micron” in their names—the then-current buzzwords for “small.” They adopted “nano” in their names in the late ’80s and ’90s, when “nanotechnology” was coming to mean “the technology that comes after micro-technology.” But nanotechnology is only the latest in a long series of buzzwords to describe “the next smallest technology.” Our colleague, Hyungsub Choi at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, found a wonderful one from the ’60s—“angstronics.” A decade earlier, Arthur von Hippel was writing extensively about what he called “molecular engineering” using rhetoric nearly indistinguishable from modern nano advocates’. Our point is that what today is called nanotechnology is part of at least a 50-year arc of science and engineering. The same story of continuity could be told for any of the other hot new technologies currently under consideration.

While they make for nice bedtime reading, tidy and packaged histories do a disservice to policymakers who want to—who need to—understand how innovation actually occurs.

These examples demonstrate a trap that policymakers could fall into if they insist that nano is exclusively new and revolutionary—what historians call “Whig history.” The term comes from the 18^th century, when members of the English Whig party tended to see the past as continual progress toward the then-present state of liberty and enlightenment. When adapted to the history of science and technology, Whig history appears as a steady series of discoveries and successes. Instead of understanding the past in its own terms, the Whig version has “good scientists” working to uncover Truth while “bad scientists” appear to be holding back the inexorable march of progress. Widely rejected by professional historians, the Whiggish understanding of science and technology as a succession of events that take place in laboratories, stripped of any social context, is still popular with many philosophers and some scientists and policymakers.

Whig history applied to nanotechnology would have scholars focus only on success stories, tales of lab discoveries that led to new understandings of the world or which were translated into commercial successes. If a discovery turned out to be false or a prediction turned out to be unrealizable, it would have no role in Whig history. Whig history would, for instance, quite rightly uphold the STM as a great success. But it would ignore one of the STM’s great disasters—the claim that it could image (and potentially sequence) the atoms making up strands of DNA. That claim was quickly overturned, yet in its brief life it played an important role in building demand for a commercial STM industry.

Likewise, Whig history would ignore “angstronics” and von Hippel’s “molecular engineering” because they were not successful at the time—but doing so artificially reinforces the claim that nano is new (since its predecessors have been dropped from the historical record).

Finally, Whig history would neglect the role of futurists like K. Eric Drexler in the 1980s in popularizing fantastic visions of what radical nanotechnologies might accomplish. Scientists then—and especially now—dismiss the feasibility of Drexler’s “molecular assemblers,” yet even as fantasies these images helped create public interest in the field which, in turn, helped motivate science policy. Whig history would emphasize that Nobelist Richard Smalley did his best to discredit Drexler in 2001 and 2003. But it would ignore Smalley’s promotion of Drexler’s ideas in the early ’90s as a way to build support for his plans for nanotechnology at Rice University. And Whig history would leave aside Smalley’s own use of futuristic (and perhaps even outlandish) visions of nano-enabled space elevators to promote his research on carbon nanotubes. While both Drexler and Smalley’s futuristic visions have not (and may never) come to pass, these things were taken seriously at the time, and the job of an historian is to look at things as they were interpreted at the time.

Adopting a view of history that only considers success stories creates a very real danger for policymakers. Think how uninformed such an approach would be if applied to the history of the auto industry. The Whig methodology would restrict such a history to only those technologies that currently count as an automobile—i.e. internal combustion vehicles. To do so, though, would strip away any focus on all the alternative types of horseless carriages (electric, steam, etc.) that once existed, not to mention all the alternative forms of transport (e.g. trolleys) that were put out of business by the auto industry. The policy implications of such a restricted viewpoint are obvious: it makes the internal combustion car look “natural” and therefore the only game in town.

Our recommendations for policymakers in the new Obama administration are two-fold. When considering whether to advocate and fund “new” emerging technologies, they must be aware that technological change is rarely revolutionary—continuity is the norm, not the exception. Understanding and appreciating the historical arc that 21^st century technologies emerge from is vital. Path-dependency matters. Institutions and social networks are built primarily from prior institutions and social networks. That means that attempts to command social entities into existence rarely work, and that the rules and values of preceding institutions and social networks will continue to influence new organizations set up to support an emerging technology.

At the same time, there is much to be learned by considering more than just success stories. While they make for nice bedtime reading, tidy and packaged histories do a disservice to policymakers who want to—who need to—understand how innovation actually occurs. That understanding can only be achieved by considering failures, anomalies, and oddities, as well as what actually worked. Research that fully illuminates the history of emerging technologies like nanotech may well help both critics and supporters to find common ground—for debate, if not for agreement. It may also help provide a better informational foundation on which to identify and nurture the innovations that will be needed in years to come. Good policies and good decisions are based on good history.

Cyrus Mody is an assistant professor of history at Rice University. W. Patrick McCray is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a member of Science Progress’s Advisory Board. Both Mody and McCray are researchers at the NSF-funded Center for Nanotechnology in Society (CNS-UCSB). This essay reflects their views only and not those of either the CNS-UCSB or the NSF.

This fascinating conference, sponsored by the Food and Drug Law Institute and aimed largely at company officials, offered panel after panel of lawyers telling nanotech execs how to avoid getting sued by…other lawyers.

Whether it’s about suing or being sued, it seems that nanotechnology—and every other new technology with a still-uncertain benefit-to-risk ratio—is a 21^st century Full Employment Act for attorneys.

“‘Sophisticated user’ is a great defense….That’s how we’ve escaped liability for lots of clients.”

“If you think nanotech liability claims are never going to be a problem, you’re dreaming,” said Lynn L. Bergeson, a partner at Bergeson & Campbell P.C. in Washington, noting that even a “fear of disease” is sufficient basis these days for filing a lawsuit. That’s a standard that may not be difficult to meet today given the array of worrisome, if inconclusive, studies about the possible health risks posed by nanotech’s microscopic fibers and engineered particles, which, depending on who you ask, are either the key to future techno-prosperity or the harbingers of environmental and medical Armageddon. It’s even possible, Bergeson said, that a court might consider it a violation of current worker safety laws if a company is not maintaining detailed records of each employee’s exposure to nanomaterials, for reference years later should certain cancers or other ailments come to be associated with the high-tech materials.

In short, if you are a nanotech company you need to start developing a legal strategy for “how to protect yourself,” summarized Henry Chajet, an attorney with Patton Boggs. Listening, I felt sheepish for thinking it was about how to protect your employees and customers.

Truth be told, such defensiveness is understandable. Some critics have exaggerated the negative health implications of preliminary animal studies involving nanomaterials and have unfairly ignored the technology’s real promise. And plaintiffs’ attorneys already are boldly trolling the Internet for potential clients who believe they may have been harmed by nanotechnology.

“They are actively hunting for that next [equivalent to an] asbestos case, which, by the way, made them billions,” said James Chen of Crowell & Moring LLP, a DC-based food and drug law firm.

One of the best ways to stay clear of such lawsuits is to post adequate safety warnings for workers and consumers, Chajet advised, so that any user who eventually claims to have been harmed by the stuff can be argued in court to have been a “sophisticated user”—someone who was aware of the risks and took them anyway.

“‘Sophisticated user’ is a great defense,” Chajet said. “That’s how we’ve escaped liability for lots of clients.”

“Don’t test yourself out of a product.”

Nowhere is the nanotech industry’s nervousness about its own potential liability more apparent than in its relationship with regulators, several of whom also made presentations at the FDLI conference. Agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration are still trying to work out how nanotech fits into existing regulations, and whether new guidances or rules may be required to protect the public. That means that for now, at least, regulators are largely relying on their sparkling personalities and cajoling invitations to “come talk to us” just to find out what nano-companies are up to.

Not that any lawyer would encourage a company to participate.

“You can be the government’s guinea pig if you turn in a lot of data,” warned George Burdock, president of the Burdock Group, an Orlando-based consulting firm. While companies should do enough safety tests of their products to show they were reasonably diligent, Burdock added, they should not overdo it. “Don’t test yourself out of a product,” he advised.

Given warnings like that one, it should not be surprising that companies have hardly been lining up at regulator’s doors. Fewer than 30 companies have offered information under a one-year-old EPA program that asks nanocompanies to volunteer information. In the words of Jesse Barkas, a program attorney in EPA’s chemical control division, that’s “really pretty low participation.” What’s more, participating companies have ultimately provided “little actual data,” Barkas lamented. And for those of you who might want to know more, don’t come to the EPA. Much of what the companies provided is classified as “confidential business information” so is unavailable for public review.

Participation has been even lower for the agency’s voluntary “in-depth” program, in which companies are asked to divulge even more details about their products. Only four companies have volunteered, Barkas said. And although they have been generally forthcoming about the physical characteristics of their products, they have provided “very little data on eco-toxicity.”

All told, Barkas said, there is a “pretty big gap” between what the agency knows about nanoproducts and what is out there on the marketplace. The agency needs a lot more information, she said, “so we can get our arms around what it is we are regulating.”

In a few cases, nonetheless, the EPA has begun to use sticks as well as carrots. In March it will begin enforcing a decree that requires all manufacturers and importers of carbon nanotubes—some types of which have been shown to cause tissue damage similar to that caused by asbestos fibers—to notify the agency before releasing their products onto the market. Federal regulators also recently declared that they will demand tighter controls on nanoscale particles of titanium dioxide (used in paints and pigments) and alumina/silica, in recognition of the added health risks these ultrafine powders appear to pose compared to their larger particulate cousins.

Some states are also getting tougher. In January, California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control sent letters to the 27 companies and universities that it believes are manufacturing or importing carbon nanotubes, and asked a series of tricky legal questions such as: “When released, does your material constitute a hazardous waste under California Health & Safety Code provisions?”

“I’m not here to give legal advice,” said John Monica, of Porter Wright Morris & Arthur LLP, a Washington law firm, “but…God help you if you say ‘yes’ to that.”

Jim O’Reilly, of Baker & Daniels in Cincinnati, encouraged nanotech execs to hire a few experts to do enough basic studies so they can at least argue that they made a good effort to determine employee risks. The expense will pale in comparison to the cost of defending yourself in a tort case, he said, noting that “for one lawyer’s time you can hire four industrial hygienists.”

Given all the money being spent and made in the field of nano-liability, some are wondering aloud what they will do for a living if this self-sustaining element of the U.S. economy ever peters out. In the words of Donald Ewert, an environmental health and safety manager at Oso BioPharmaceuticals Manufacturing LLC in Albuquerque: “I’m wondering…what we’re all going to do when we find out that nanotechnology is not dangerous?”

But lawyers are nothing if not good at spotting the next income stream. “Synthetic biology!” one quickly shouted, referring to the controversial new science of making artificial bacteria and viruses from scratch.

Well, I’m not here to give legal advice. But if you think you’ve been harmed by a synthetic life form, there is definitely an attorney out there who wants to talk to you.

Rick Weiss is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Science Progress.

At the time, Michael Crichton had recently come out with his terror novel, Prey, which is about self-organizing nanoparticles running amok and unleashing coordinated attacks against humanity. There was talk about the book being made into a major motion picture. “All I can say is we better get our messaging out about nano before the movie comes out,” an NSF official said to me during a break. “Otherwise the battle is lost.”

As it turns out, the movie did not get made. But two new studies published last week suggest that it may not matter much whether the NSF gets around to educating the public about this new technology, at least not in the conventional sense of education. Despite the common conception that a better-educated public is more likely to appreciate and support scientific and technological advances, the new study found that deeply ingrained psychological and cultural factors drive individuals’ acceptance or rejection of new and potentially frightening technologies—much more so than factual information.

For people whose cultural views leave them disinclined to trust new technologies, the act of getting more information—even very balanced information—can harden rather than soften attitudes of opposition.

“Our study reinforces the conclusions of other researchers who have cautioned against assuming that enlightened public opinion will spontaneously emerge from accumulating scientific information on the risks and benefits of nanotechnology,” write Dan M. Kahan, of the Yale Law School, and his colleagues in the December 7 online edition of Nature Nanotechnology.

Indeed, the team found, for people whose cultural views leave them disinclined to trust new technologies, the act of getting more information—even very balanced information—can harden rather than soften attitudes of opposition. That finding, along with the conclusions from an accompanying study that finds a strong link between religiosity and rejection of nanotechnology, suggest that proponents of the technology—along with federal regulators—have some serious work to do beyond public education if the field is to break through safely to commercial success.

A 20-second refresher: Nano has to do with engineered particles, fibers, and devices between 1 and 100 billionths of a meter in diameter—a scale so small that it involves in some cases the manipulation of individual atoms. Ordinary materials behave in extraordinary ways at that size scale, offering materials scientists a new palette of chemical, electrical, and optical properties to work with, but also posing potential threats because of these substances’ ability to get into the body or contaminate the environment.

Many studies have shown that, in general, Americans have vaguely positive feelings about nanotechnology but also that they know very little about it. To see what underpins those feelings and what impact more information might have, Kahan and his colleagues surveyed 1,862 adults. The goal was to see which of two models best described how people come to perceive nano’s risks and benefits: the “familiarity hypothesis,” which posits that the more people know about nano the more they will appreciate and trust it, or the “cultural cognition” hypothesis, which predicts that preexisting worldviews (in particular, whether one is in essence “individualistic” or “communitarian”) will largely determine people’s attitudes toward the science, irrespective of how much they actually know about it. (The individualists tend to be supportive, while communitarians worry about negative impacts on others and on the world.)

Among those in the study who knew relatively little about nano and were not told anything new in the survey, people of both worldviews were equally likely to be supportive of the technology—about 61 percent of them. But that changed when people of each worldview were given identical, balanced fact sheets that offered equal amounts of detail on both benefits and risks. Their knowledge-bases thusly enriched, people with individualistic worldviews became 25 percent more likely to support the science than they were before. By contrast, communitarians responded to the same information by becoming 38 percent less likely to be supportive than they had been.

After reading the same information, that is, two groups of people who once felt the same about the technology suddenly were split, 86 percent to 23 percent—scientific proof, of a sort, that some people really do see the glass as half empty while others see it as half full.

In the second study, led by Dietram A. Scheufele of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, researchers compared Americans’ attitudes about whether nanotechnology “is morally acceptable” against measures of their religiosity, and found the two to be inversely correlated. (Surveys have found similar trends for other areas of science, perhaps because of a sense among some religious people that scientists are meddling with aspects of nature that are properly God’s domain.) Then, going further, they surveyed people in several European countries. They found a clear continuum in which people in countries with the lowest levels of religiosity had the highest odds of finding nanotech to be morally acceptable, while those living in countries with high measures of religiosity (the United States being higher than even the highest in Europe, namely Ireland and Italy) had the lowest odds of finding nanotech to be morally acceptable.

Those relationships held true even when the researchers applied correction factors to account for differences in the countries’ general alignment with science, as measured by national research productivity and high-school science scores.

One way to gain public confidence and acceptance, of course, is to reassure consumers that the government has assessed the science and implemented responsible oversight policies. As I’ve written here and here, and as confirmed last week in a new report from the National Research Council, the feds still have a lot of work to do in this regard.

But if the new studies are right about the importance of pre-existing worldviews and religiosity, then it will take more than government pronouncements to gain widespread public support for nano, which the Commerce Department has hailed as nothing less than “the next industrial revolution.”

Worldviews and religiosity are not easily changed or overcome. So is the prospect for a positive consensus on nano altogether out of reach?

“Nothing in our study suggests that cultural polarization over nanotechnology is inevitable,” Kahan and his colleagues write. “Social psychology is making important advances in identifying techniques for framing information on controversial policy issues in a manner that makes it possible for people of diverse values to derive the same factual information from it.”

To which I can only say: Really? That sounds awfully close to the line between education and brainwashing, doesn’t it?

Come to think of it, compared to being subjected to educational materials engineered by social psychologists that are guaranteed to convince me that everything is okay, I wonder if I might just rather live in an intellectually stunted, religiously suffused, and hopelessly divided country where there is at least a free and full, if largely fruitless, debate still going on.

That’s my (very small) worldview. And I’m sticking to it.

Rick Weiss is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Science Progress.

In a 97-page report released today, the NRC criticizes the current research plan on human health and environmental impacts of the National Nanotechnology Initiative–multiagency project to ramp up nanotech in the United states. From the National Academies press release:

The research plan, developed by the National Nanotechnology Initiative, does not provide a clear picture of the current understanding of these risks or where it should be in 10 years, says the new report. Nor does the NNI plan include research goals to help ensure that nanotechnologies are developed and used as safely as possible. And though the research needs listed in the plan are valuable, they are incomplete, in some cases missing elements crucial for progress in understanding nanomaterials’ health and safety impacts. A new national strategic plan is needed that goes beyond federal research to incorporate research from academia, industry, consumer and environmental groups, and other stakeholders, the committee concluded.

Of particular concern is how nanomaterials interact with the human body. As Rick Weiss reported earlier this year, the FDA knows that it needs to at least issue guidance on super-potent nanoscale drugs and other consumer products like cosmetics that contain nanoengineered particles, but has consistently failed to do so. There are at least 800 products on the market today containing nanomaterials. The new report chides the NNI plans for supporting drug R&D without sufficient complimentary research on risks.

In response to the report’s release, the House Science and Technology Committee issued a statement saying that Chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN) would reintroduce legislation that aimed to cover these environmental, health, and safety gaps. The bill passed the House last year but then stalled in the Senate.

Andrew Maynard, Chief Science Advisor at the Wilson Center Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, and who served on the NRC board that produced the report, framed the conclusions within a larger context on his blog, 2020 Science. He argues that without a national research strategy–and smart approaches to presenting the value of research to policymakers and the public–the investment in initiatives like the NNI won’t payoff. He writes:

And here’s the rub: if the new technology isn’t safe, isn’t perceived to be safe, or is plagued by uncertainty over how to use it safely, it will be stymied. And the economic and societal benefits will dwindle from a flood to a trickle.

He lays blame at the feet of the outgoing conservative administration the lack of an overarching innovation strategy and looks forward to new leadership under the president-elect.

UPDATE: The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies underscored the criticisms of the NRC report and reminds policymakers of their recommendations for improved funding mechanisms for the NNI that could the the research plan on track.

More on nanotech at Science Progress:

• Rick Weiss: Nanoparticles Get Nanoregulation
• Rick Weiss: Time to Sweat the Small Stuff
• W. Patrick McCray: It’s Just Like That, Except Different

Peter D. Hart Research Associates

One of the slides from the President of Peter D. Hart Research Associates Geoffrey Garin’s presentation.

Some new products built on advances in nanotechnology improving people’s quality of life. There are anti-bacterial wound dressings that use nanoscale silver; there’s a nanoscale dry powder that can neutralize gas and liquid toxins in chemical spills; and batteries manufactured with nanoscale materials can deliver more power more quickly with less heat. In 2007 the federal government provided $1.3 billion in funding for research on nanotechnology through the National Nanotechnology Initiative.

So how come nobody’s ever heard of these wonderful new advancements? A new report release yesterday by the Wilson Center’s Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies and Peter D. Hart Research reveals that almost half of U.S. adults have heard nothing about nanotechnology, and nearly 9 in 10 Americans say they have heard just a little or nothing at all about the emerging field of synthetic biology. The report, “The American Public’s Awareness Of And Perceptions About Potential Risks and Benefits of Nanotechnology & Synthetic Biology,” also reveals that no major change has occurred in the U.S. public’s awareness since 2004, when Hart Research conducted the first poll on the topic on behalf of the PEN. Geoffery Garin, president of Peter D. Hart Research Associates, gave a presentation yesterday showing that almost 50 percent of Americans aren’t even sure if nanotechnology is worth the risk.

In early September on Science Progress, Arthur Caplan made six recommendations for the new administration’s science policy, including developing nanotechnology to clean water and developing synthetic biology to “fight diseases, make synthetic fuels, eat pollutants, clean the oceans and our arteries.” With the potential for nanotech and synbio to make such a profound impact on society, the government and press should make a concerted effort to inform the public of these technologies. But as Rick Weiss has argued, there’s still a significant amount of investigation and regulation that needs to happen for certain nano applications, chief among them drug development.

“Early in the administration of the next president, scientists are expected to take the next major step toward the creation of synthetic forms of life. Yet the results from the first U.S. telephone poll about synthetic biology show that most adults have heard just a little or nothing at all about it,” said Director David Rejeski, in a PEN news release.

Weiss’s Notebook

CAP Senior Fellow Rick Weiss covered science and medicine for The Washington Post for 15 years, and now he brings his investigative eye to science policy. From cloning and stem cells to agricultural biotechnology and nanotechnology, Weiss examines the issues at the intersection of cutting edge research and public policy.

No one expects the federal bureaucracy to move quickly. To paraphrase the old Willie Dixon song, the government is built for comfort, not for speed. And okay, the bureaucracy is bound to appear especially sluggish when compared to the speed of scientific progress.

But there was something especially stultifying last week about the Food and Drug Administration’s latest effort to figure out how to protect the public from foods, drugs, cosmetics, and other products spiked with nanotech ingredients. A sleepy fog suffused the Rockville, MD meeting rooms where agency officials listened all day to scientists, policy experts, and consumer advocates. One could not help but wonder how many new nano-laced products had made their way onto supermarket shelves that day while the grinding wheels of the federal oversight machine ground around in their grinding grindiness.

Nanotechnology, as the general public increasingly knows, refers to the science of the very small. It involves the engineering of materials on the order of a billionth of a meter, or a few ten-thousandths the diameter of a human hair. The cool thing about such minuscule materials is that they take on novel properties that the very same chemical substances do not exhibit when made in chunkier dimensions. Substances that normally don’t conduct electricity suddenly do when made on the nanoscale. Things that are normally opaque become transparent. Matter normally weak becomes strong.

The not-so-cool thing about nanoscale materials is that they can be far more toxic to cells and other biological systems than macro versions of the same stuff. When it comes to safety, size matters.

That’s relevant to the FDA because the products that it regulates are increasingly being made with nanoscale ingredients. Nanoparticulate medicines can be absorbed faster. Cosmetics with nanoparticles penetrate the skin’s outer layers better. Nanoscale food additives can improve flavor, texture, and “mouth feel.” The problem is, it is not at all clear that conventional testing methods long relied upon by the agency to assure that foods, drugs, and cosmetics are safe can discern the unique risks that may be posed by nanoingredients.

The number of consumer products on the market containing nanoparticles or nanofibers now exceeds 800 and is growing rapidly.

The FDA has been struggling for years to come up with an approach for figuring this out. It determined back in 2007 that it ought to release at least a general guidance for manufacturers—a far cry short of actual regulation, but at least a start—that would lay out the kinds of safety standards manufacturers ought to apply as they seek to market products with nanoscale ingredients. At a follow-up meeting earlier this summer, agency advisors hedged on that modest commitment, suggesting it may be premature to produce even a general guidance document.

At the latest meeting, agency officials at least appeared to recommit themselves to producing some kind of document that might assure consumers that someone is looking out for their safety. But at the risk of practicing medicine without a license, let me give you a bit of advice: Don’t … hold … your … breath.

Admittedly, the problem is complex. The science of nanotoxicology is still young. Definitive safety tests for nanoscale materials are far from perfect. And too heavy a regulatory hand could stifle innovation in a fast-paced and potentially revolutionary field of science. But entrepreneurs, who see big dollar signs in small stuff, are not showing restraint.

According to conservative estimates by the Washington-based Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, the number of consumer products on the market containing nanoparticles or nanofibers now exceeds 800 and is growing rapidly. That includes 125 cosmetic products, which already as a class are barely regulated by the FDA, even though most of them are meant to be applied directly to the skin; and 44 dietary supplements, which, thanks to Congressional action back in 1994, can today be marketed to consumers not only without first having to prove they are safe or effective, but without even having to prove that they actually contain what they say they contain.

Unfortunately, FDA is still at Nano Square One, debating how to define the term “nanotechnology”—a question most expert groups got past several years ago.

“Nanotechnology has the potential to blur the boundary between cosmetics and drugs.”

At the Rockville meeting, manufacturers and their trade-group representatives leaned on FDA to let them self-regulate. Many of their nanoproducts, they said, are not really nano, because those nanoparticles tend to clump together into larger agglomerates. That raised a question: So why make those ingredients nanoscale to begin with? Because, it turns out, even after they clump together, they exhibit many of the properties conferred upon them by virtue of their essential nano-ness. Well, doesn’t that suggest that the peculiar toxicities of nanoscale materials might also persist, even after agglomeration?

There is “no evidence” of any unique toxicities associated with drugs made this way, said Daniel Caldwell of Johnson & Johnson. Of course, there is pretty much “no evidence” of anything, one way or the other, because there is virtually no research going into this question.

As I’ve written before, drugs, at least, do have to pass reasonably rigorous tests for overall safety and efficacy before being marketed. So although I worry that regulators might not be using the best tests to actually detect novel (and perhaps long-term) toxicities associated with nanotech, at least there is something of a safety net there. Not so for foods, food additives, cosmetics and dietary supplements, which effectively only get regulated after evidence arises that they are making people sick. That’s especially worrisome because one of the reasons nanotech is being increasingly incorporated into these kinds of products is to increase absorption into the body and boost their biological impacts.

“Nanotechnology has the potential to blur the boundary between cosmetics and drugs,” said Andrew Maynard of the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies.

How can FDA reasonably protect public health in this interim period before researchers completely understand the science of nanotechnology?

In the food arena, one way would be for the agency to just agree up front that it will reject applications seeking to declare nanoingredients as “Generally Recognized as Safe,” or GRAS—the classification granted to some foods and food additives that have a long history of safe use. Specifically, while the macro form of an ingredient may indeed be GRAS, nano versions should not be presumed to have the same safety profile and instead should be declared as being subject to the same kind of oversight as other novel foods or food additives.

In the drug arena, the billion-dollar question is going to be whether drugs that are formulated with nanomaterials deserve to be treated as entirely new chemical entities or simply as innocuously modified versions of already approved drugs. That’s going to be a tough call, and will probably need to be decided on a case-by-case basis. But it may be that the default should be “new chemical entity,” unless the manufacturer can present compelling evidence that the safety and efficacy profile of the new product is not significantly more worrisome than the old.

“If you’re going to hype it as ‘all new,’ then you ought to be testing it as ‘all new,’” said Jaydee Hanson of the Washington-based International Center for Technology Assessment.

In the arena of dietary supplements, the FDA has very little flexibility and authority, but it does have at least one legal means of keeping a grip on the growing use of nanotechnology: declare that all nanomaterials in dietary supplements will be categorized by the agency as “new dietary ingredients,” or “NDI.” By doing so, said William B. Schultz, an attorney and former FDA deputy commissioner for policy, supplement makers would be required to notify the agency at least 75 days before starting to market a product with nanomaterials in it. It would also require that these companies show the FDA the safety data they have relied on, as marketers, to ensure that the nanoproducts they are about to sell are safe. That would at least give the FDA a fighting chance of looking into the product’s potential risks before the product hits the market.

The beauty and utility of the NDI designation, Schultz noted, is that FDA does not have to prove that the product is unsafe if it wants to keep the product off the market. It must simply declare that the company did not supply adequate information to convince the agency that it is safe. Of course, that can only happen if the agency has the staff it would take to review these applications before the 75-day period passes. And given current staffing and funding, which have left the agency unable to keep up even with more pressing reports of people becoming sick from supplements, there is not much chance of it getting sufficiently ahead of the curve to review applications before products get marketed.

Today, Schultz said, the dietary supplements office of the FDA is “barely alive.”

Hopefully the FDA will figure out a way to get a handle on nano before the same can be said for those of us eating the stuff, or getting it in our medicines.

Rick Weiss is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Science Progress.

Insects pack an amazing set of capabilities into a very small package. Understanding and mimicking those abilities—like the fly’s sensitive vision—can allow researchers to shrink the size of autonomous robots to proportions like those of household pests. The trick may lie in skipping all the complex equipment necessary to imitate real vision, and building sensors that handle the bare minimum of navigational data, as one example. To understand the process of building devices like this, it worth considering what insects are capable of and how they surpass even our most well-developed existing technologies.

Forget the self-preservation instincts of that fly. It, like you, has to find dinner. It has to find a mate and a suitable housing tract for the little loved ones. A bee flies out of a hole in a tree in a random pattern looking for food for the hive. A kilometer away, in an unplanned direction, it scores. It has found your neighbor’s blooming hydrangea bushes. Now it flies directly back to the hole in the tree and magically dances for its hive-mates to tell them where they can find dinner.

That’s all very impressive, but humans are pretty bright, too. Some of us are currently making robot-like, semi-autonomous systems. These moving devices can make decisions and perform complex tasks, like negotiate and avoid a set of obstacles on complex terrain. A perfect example is the development of Martian Rover-type vehicles—though with these devices, humans have final say over the machine’s decisions.

So how do these things work? First, there’s the basic vehicle or “platform” as we call it in Department of Defense lingo. If the platform is the size of an automobile, then engineers have lots of room to work with and house the necessary components, which include a motor, storage for fuel or some other energy source, and a mechanical apparatus for propulsion. Turn here, fly there, or whatever. So far, so good.

All this we have built for years, and very well I might add: cars, planes, and boats. But what about equipment for gathering information about surroundings? This starts off simple too. In the dim past, we put cameras on the vehicle and remote operators used the sensory input to navigate. More high-tech solutions put a small radar or ultrasound device on the vehicle to determine distances and display the results to a human operator. Again, so far, so good.

It is impractical to just keep shrinking the systems we have used successfully for years.

But we want a real robot. That’s what we’re shooting for. So we hook up all the sensor information to a big computer and write a program for the computer to extract the information it needs to navigate from the images provided by the sensors. Systems like these are a marvel of modern computational capability.

Now comes the real question. What do we do when the vehicle, or platform, needs to get smaller? And not just a little smaller, a lot smaller—insect size. Perhaps half an inch long or smaller. How do we make operational platforms this small? Do you just keep shrinking things down?

We could perform rather expensive experiments to try and answer those questions. Or, if the experiment has already been done—and it has—we could look to the available data for the answers. Actually, nature did the experiment hundreds of millions of years ago, and I will paraphrase the results this way: If we have enough room on board a creature, or platform, to perform complex processing, then we have the luxury of using “regular,” eyes to provide an image of the outside world. The on-board processor, the brain, has the computational power to determine the key survival/decision making issues from those images.

But what happens when the creature/platform is too small to carry a complex processor on board? We could just skip the image part all together and get the information needed directly from the outside world. This is what some, but not all, insects do.

Let’s try a simple thought experiment. Take your old boss, the one you did not like, along with a honeybee, and imagine them in a large featureless plain in say, Nebraska, with an overcast sky. Explain to each of them that if they travel east of north by 37 degrees, they will find adequate food and water. The bee is in good shape, but your mean old boss is in trouble because he has no good images to work with and is lost. The bee, on the other hand, notices that the ultraviolet light from the sun is polarized by the atmosphere in a manner consistent with its position in the sky, immediately orients its flight path, even with cloud cover, to 37 degrees east of north, and takes off into the wild blue yonder. The crucial point here is that the bee brain is capable of processing data for certain tasks without the need for visual images.

It is impractical to just keep shrinking the systems we have used successfully for years. Building a one-inch platform that can fly, navigate, and store energy is difficult. Adding sensors, processing, and communications capabilities so that is can send all the information it acquires back to home base is just too hard. Forget it. The insect model is the only practical one. What we need is to better define that model and its capabilities. Then we can better define the possible.

Recent advances in optical design allow for crude models of the insect hardware: real compound eyes coupled to complex sensors. These are “instrumentation sensors,” rather than imaging sensors, though they are capable of crude imaging when necessary. They can be made small and can be replicated cheaply. But to fully exploit this technology, we need a better understanding of the myriad of tasks performed by land, sea, and airborne creatures that are useful to our needs, before we can reproduce them in hardware.

Shown schematically is the fiber bundle interior of a compound eye manufactured by a process called “laser ablation,” which is similar to the method used to correct peoples’ vision. On the right is a completed eye with three zones of short and long focal length lenses. The light captured by each lens is directed by its fiber to the sensor array plane.^[1]

We spend much of our research resources on learning how higher-order animals think and how they process information. Human brains are a marvel of complexity. But is there a primordial component within our own processing that predates imaging? A part tied to survival of the individual that is faster and tied directly to data? When we study the insect thought process, we might learn a little more about our own.

Remember that fly? It was not so easy to swat—but you were proud of the fact that you could. Perhaps we have a bit more to learn than meets the eye.

Dr. Jerry Franck is a Senior Scientist at the Night Vision & Electronic Sensors Directorate (NVESD), Ft. Belvoir, VA. He has authored a patent on behalf of the Army on this topic titled, “Method of Manufacture for a Compound Eye.” He has joint responsibilities as head of the International Programs and as a research physicist working in the area of optical design including such topics as “High Power Coherent Laser Combination,” and “High Power Compact Short Pulse Laser.” He received his Ph.D. at Optical Sciences from University of Arizona’s Optical Science Center, Tucson, AZ and his Masters Degree from the University of North Texas. He is interested in paleontology and is an amateur fossil collector.

Notes

[1] U.S. Army Patent Application, “Method of Manufacture for a Compound Eye,” J. B. Franck, Filled 21 April 2005, Ref #: NVL 3304.

Well, nanotechnology is indeed making its way into medicine. But as might have been expected, it is doing so in more modest, albeit impressive, ways, scientists told a panel of Food and Drug Administration advisers earlier this week. Therapeutic powders for use in pills and capsules are being ground into nanoscale motes of medicine that are orders of magnitude smaller than the “micronized” powders widely used today—an advance that promises to speed absorption, increase effectiveness and perhaps even improve safety, since less of the drug may be needed in this form. Cancer medicines are being made so small that they can wend their way through tightly layered body tissues, giving them unprecedented access to their tumor targets. Before long, doctors may even have access to their first “theragnostics”—engineered nanoscale molecules that are both diagnostic (by glomming onto tumors and making those cancers “light up” on an imaging device, for example) and therapeutic (by destroying those tumors once they attach to them, and allowing doctors to monitor their demise).

But even as the first wave of novel nanoproducts is washing up on the FDA’s shores in the hope of gaining marketing approval, the agency is still trying to figure out whether its age-old criteria for determining the safety and efficacy of new drugs need to be upgraded to deal with this new world of nanotech. After all, nanoscale materials, which are generally between 1 and 100 billionths of a meter in size, or a few ten-thousandths the width of a human hair, are in many cases far more toxic than the same materials in bulk form. Indeed, the blessings of nano are also its curses. Nanoparticles will get into those tumors, for example, but they will also get into places you don’t want them to get. And when they get there, they will do things you don’t want them to do, because particles that size tend to be far more chemically reactive than the same materials in larger form. So FDA officials, along with their counterparts in other agencies dealing with their own versions of the nanotech revolution, need to figure out how to judge these new materials, and pronto.

Yet most have barely taken a nanostep.

As a sign of how slowly the FDA is moving to address this issue, consider that the main question that advisors scratched their heads over at this week’s meeting was whether the agency ought to craft some helpful “guidance” for industry, to tell companies the kinds of things they ought to consider as they start pitching their new nanodrugs for approval. Sound familiar? It ought to. It was the same question asked—and answered—by the FDA’s own Nanotechnology Task Force last year. The answer, by the way, was “yes.”

“The guidances the Task Force is recommending would give affected manufacturers and other interested parties timely information about FDA’s expectations, so as to foster predictability in the agency’s regulatory processes, thereby enabling innovation and enhancing transparency, while protecting the public health,” that task force concluded exactly a year ago today.

At this week’s meeting, advisors split fifty-fifty on the question, though there was nothing reassuring in the reasoning behind several of those who voted against crafting that guidance. That “no,” several said, was not a reflection of their confidence that the current system was adequate. Rather it came from their realization that no one has much of a clue what to look out for and what to tell these companies. That is a disconcerting sentiment from the agency that regulates the nation’s medicines, medical devices, food additives, and cosmetics (and don’t get me started on those last two categories, which are already heavily laden with nanotech ingredients with absolutely no approval from the FDA because food additives and cosmetics are effectively not subject to FDA oversight until after they cause harm).

Of course, we can hope that there is no particular risk to these products. We can hope that the slides presented to FDA advisors by Darin Furgeson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is doing research on nanotoxicity, were misleading as they showed little laboratory fish developing abnormally after being raised in water spiked with small amounts of nanoparticles. “Some changes begin to occur,” Furgeson told the FDA advisors with nonjudgmental equanimity. Among his observations: “Their eyes began to get different shapes.” “Excess fluid around the heart.” “Even the number of vertebrae changes,” as does the curvature of the spine.*

This was not true for all nanoparticles at all concentrations. But perhaps most worrisome, experiments described by Furgeson showed that extremely minor differences in the size or structure of various nanoparticles can make big differences in their apparent toxicity, suggesting that this is not going to be an easy field to get straight.

Later I spoke to Frank M. Torti, principal deputy commissioner and chief scientist at the FDA, and mentioned that if I were a little more jaded then I might conclude that the FDA is going to keep asking the question of whether guidance is needed until it gets the answer that it and the industry wants. After all, while guidance is technically just a recommendation, it can be time consuming to craft and is seen by companies as added regulation. Torti urged patience. While it may be helpful, he agreed, to provide industry with some general pointers about how to assure their nanoproducts are safe, based on what little is known to date, it would be more helpful to have guidance a little later that incorporates findings from the research now being conducted by FDA and others.

“There is ton of stuff going on with nano,” Torti said of the federal research agenda. Meanwhile, he added, the good thing about how the FDA regulates is that, in the end, whether a company knows everything about how its product works or not, it has to prove that the product is safe in animal tests and human studies before getting permission to market it. So bad medicines of any kind are likely to get screened out.

I think that an assignment to write guidance on nano would force the FDA to focus, and give the topic the aura of urgency it deserves. But truth be told, the safety of nano in medicine is but a minor worry of mine compared to the equivalent safety challenges posed by nano for other regulators such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. At the FDA, at least, the rules are plain, at least at high altitude: Before being approved, a company must show that its product is safe and effective. There are going to be some questions about how to prove these things for nano-based medicines, but in the end, even if very little is known about why nanomaterials behave as they do, dangerous ones will hopefully be identified during the standard safety testing in animals and early studies in people.

Source: J. Clarence Davies, “Nanotechnology Oversight,” (Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2008).

By contrast, safety rules under the authority of EPA and OSHA are in many cases written differently. Pesticides, for example, are regulated by EPA under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, or FIFRA, only if they are plainly advertised as pesticides. Thus the many products on the market that are loaded with nanoparticles of silver as a means of killing bacteria (thus preventing odors, for example, in the socks that are impregnated with that silver) today escape FIFRA regulation entirely by simply not claiming on their labels that the silver is there as a pesticide. “Big deal,” you may say. “Who wants to regulate a smidgeon of silver in socks, anyway?” Well, among others, engineers who run water treatment plants—who have complained that washing machine water laced with nanosilver threatens the survival of helpful bacteria that clean up the waste water flowing into their facilities.

Similarly, the Toxic Substances Control Act that the EPA uses to regulate various toxic chemicals typically allows companies to manufacture thousands of pounds of a chemical before that chemical is subject to regulation, on the assumption that such modest quantities can do only so much harm. But a mere pound of a chemical in nano form can be even more toxic than thousands of pounds of bulk material. Yet the law, as written, does not recognize this difference.

These and other glaring regulatory lacunae have been talked about for years, with nothing having come of it but a voluntary program, boldly promulgated by our protectors at the EPA, that asks companies to please, if they don’t mind, step forward and tell the agency what they are making. And don’t worry, dear companies, because we, the EPA, won’t tell the public what you tell us.

Surely we can do better than this. Nanotechnology is a radically promising new branch of engineering and ought to be given the best boost it can get. But just as a child does not benefit from free access to the cookie jar, the nano industry can only suffer in the end from a lack of reasonable oversight. As J. Clarence Davies, who served as an assistant EPA administrator under George H.W. Bush, said on Wednesday as he and the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies launched their latest report on what is needed in the way of new nano oversight, “We’ve realized over recent years that if you’re going to have adequate markets, you’ve got to have adequate oversight.”

Davies’s excellent report spells out numerous nano-related regulatory lapses that the new administration should tackle ASAP. What good is it, he asks, to give workers OSHA-required Material Safety Data Sheets that spell out the toxicity of the nanomaterials they are working with, if the toxicity data contained in those sheets is based on studies of the materials in bulk form? We know that these substances have very different safety profiles on the nanoscale. Yet the law does not require the sheets to reflect this.

“That’s not okay,” Davies said. “It’s deceptive and misleading and does not give the necessary guidance to workers in terms of what kinds of precautions they should take.”

The United States should not blow its early lead in nanotechnology, a field that the Commerce Department has called “the next industrial revolution.” But to get it best, we’re going to have to get it right. The window of opportunity is still open. Now is the time to sweat the small stuff.

Rick Weiss is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Science Progress.

* In response to comment #2, below, the text has been changed from “changing the curvature of the spine” to “as does the curvature of the spine.”

Expansion of communication and outreach efforts, particularly with respect to real and perceived benefits and risks associated with nanotechnology;

Developing and implementing standards critical for nanomaterial identification, characterization, and risk assessment; and

Coordinating strategically-guided nanotechnology environmental, health, and safety research across agencies, sectors, and countries and including a balanced assessment of risks and benefits in the context of specific, real-world applications.

H.R. 5940, the National Nanotechnology Initiative Amendments Act of 2008, is a step in the right direction to address these issues. The act authorizes the designation of an associate director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy as “the Coordinator for Societal Dimensions of Nanotechnology,” responsible for coordinating, planning, and prioritizing budgets of activities all required by section 2 (b) (10) of the 21st Century National Nanotechnology Research and Development Act of 2003. These activities include: developing an understanding of control and manipulation of particles at the nano scale, providing research grants, establishing a network of advanced technology user facilities and centers, and establishing interdisciplinary nanotechnology research centers.

Where this 2003 act offers a huge set of requirements for ensuring that ethical, societal, and health issues in nanotechnology are addressed, H.R. 5940 articulates a mechanism, the position of the Coordinator for Societal Dimensions of Nanotechnology, by which to fulfill these requirements. The other provisions of H.R. 5940 also provide programs to educate the public about nanotechnology and provide means for assessing the success of the NNI . H.R. 5940 was passed to the Senate and is currently in the hands of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. The Senate also received the Nanotechnology in the Schools Act, which would require the director of the National Science Foundation to establish a nanotechnology in the schools program that would fund secondary education in nanotechnology, and passed it to the Committee on Health, Labor, Education, and Pensions.

When it comes to understanding emerging fields such as information technology, biotechnology, and nanotechnology, historical analogies are just as potent. They help shape debate and can validate, even suggest, possible futures. In the 1960s, as the U.S. and USSR raced to best each other with feats in space, historians debated over whether comparisons to 19^th century railroad infrastructure could help society prepare for the shocks that robust programs of space exploration would surely bring. In 1962, in fact, NASA sponsored a project that encouraged scholars to consider the long-term implications—economic, political, and social—of the national space program.

People hold food in a much different regard than, say, sunscreen or carbon nanotubes for high-tech television displays.

When it comes to understanding potential societal and environmental implications of nanotechnologies, the historical analogy invoked most often by both nano-advocates and opponents is that of genetically-modified organisms. According to Kristen Kulinowski and Vicki Colvin of Rice University, GMOs followed a “wow to yuck” trajectory. Initially hailed as a solution to issues such as world hunger, activists saddled GMOs with a negative public image, criticized them as destructive to the environment, and condemned genetically engineered crops for the harm they might visit on the public and third world farmers.

The GMO-nano analogy, however, is historically inaccurate. The history of GMOs and the accompanying controversy cannot simply be reduced to a “wow to yuck” story in which public backlash derailed a promising industry or product. In reality, considerable ambivalence and critical debate about genetically engineered organisms existed from the technology’s very beginning. Moreover, people hold food in a much different regard than, say, sunscreen or carbon nanotubes for high-tech television displays. We deliberately eat food; we don’t ingest nanotech stain-resistant pants. By the same token, GMOs are developed for deliberate release into the environment, which is generally not the goal of most nano-oriented R&D. So while the comparison between GMOs and nanotech can help us understand some policy debates about social and environmental implications, other historical analogies would better inform policy debates and public understanding.

Another analogy that could help us understand the U.S.’s National Nanotechnology Initiative is the history of NASA’s space program. (Since 2000, the NNI has been this country’s multi-agency, multi-billion dollar nanotech program.) While not perfect, the analogy between the NNI and the formation of our national space enterprise provides several valuable points of comparison which might help us understand the nature of nano-research beyond the point where GMO/biotech association fails.

Like the space program, the NNI was conceived out of a spirit of competitiveness. Like competition with the USSR through the long twilight struggle of the Cold War, concerns that the U.S. was slipping economically relative to European and Asian countries helped foster support for the NNI. One aspect of the NNI that has received robust funding support has been the creation of national research centers—the NSF alone funds more than a dozen such sites devoted to research and public engagement—just as the flood of NASA-directed funding helped spawn a whole host of 60s-era federal and university research centers for space science and exploration.

Like space science, nanoscience research is, in principle, highly interdisciplinary, bringing together scientists and engineers from fields such as biology, chemistry, and solid-state physics. NASA itself funds four such nano-research centers, suggesting the continuation of a decades-old trend. And just as space science research in the 1960s influenced pedagogy and student training, today’s courses for budding nanotechnologists reflect a “new” hybridized approach to science education. While some skeptics have argued that the NNI’s focus on practical (i.e. commercial) applications has distorted traditional university-based research and education, the fact remains that much of 1960s space science research was done both to produce new knowledge and to get the U.S. to a clearly defined place such as the Moon or an orbit around Mars.

Broaden the view and more similarities snap into focus that suggest the power of the space-nano analogy. In 1926, the Russian space visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky wrote “First, inevitably, the idea, the fantasy, the fairy tale. Then, scientific calculation. Ultimately, fulfillment crowns the dream.” Whether or not today’s nano-advocates wish to admit it, the fact is that an aura of the fantastical has surrounded nanotechnologies since the 1980s. As late as 2000, Nobelist Richard Smalley of carbon nanotube fame was still recommending K. Eric Drexler’s 1986 techno-utopian Engines of Creation to government policy makers curious about what nano could do. Like the space frontier, advocates depicted the nano-frontier as the place where America’s manifest destiny in science and technology would next unfold. In congressional testimony, Smalley even invoked powerful imagery from the Apollo era, saying that what was needed was someone bold enough to “put a flag in the ground and say: ‘Nanotechnology, this is where we are going to go.”’

While such historical analogies can help us understand the past, and perhaps even the present, can they tell us anything about the future of emerging technologies? The now-comical phrase “power too cheap to meter” alone should be enough to induce caution when it comes to making predictions about future technologies. However, one can consider the directions the space program took after the Apollo era concluded and inject a note of caution for the U.S. nano initiative. To a large degree, as historians like Howard McCurdy have argued, NASA’s public policies were shaped by the public’s imagination as to what space exploration would be like. This entailed a strong focus on human (versus robotic) space exploration, elaborate manned space stations, and, eventually, bases on the moon and Mars. As satellites and space travel became routine, the Apollo era gave way to less exciting space shuttle flights and space probes that, while yielding tremendously exciting scientific information and inspiring vistas, did not have the same hold on the public’s attention as did the first Mercury flights or Apollo 11. As one NASA official put it, “We don’t give ticker tape parades for robots.” Ultimately, NASA’s grand ambitions were re-directed from the initial vision that many citizens found so compelling. How will the public react when it doesn’t get the nanobots or molecular assemblers that early visionaries first proposed and which were so widely promoted in hundreds of newspaper stories and popular science magazines?

Today, it is almost a cliché for science policy makers to call for another Apollo or Manhattan Project-style effort to address pressing energy needs or global warming. We must carefully choose an appropriate historical analogy in framing these suggestions, however. What policy maker would want to initiate a program that eschews long-term goals for a single spectacular feat or develop a technology under classified, wartime conditions and not fully consider its potentially profound social and ethical implications?

While invoking the Apollo era may conjure nostalgic visions of America’s past and what was right about the country at the time of great social unrest and an unpopular war, it should not be the pole star by which science policy navigates. When considering the implications of emerging technologies like nano, the power of historical analogies to shape discourse, frame media coverage, and inform the public demands more careful and reasoned attention.

W. Patrick McCray is a historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara and directs one of three main research projects at UCSB’s NSF-funded Center for Nanotechnology in Society. He is also on the Science Progress advisory board.

Robert A. Robinson, Managing Director of the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s Natural Resources and Environment Team expressed concern that the funding set aside for EHS research is not enough to fill “information gaps” when it comes to the potential human risks of nanotechnology and nanomaterials. According to a GAO report released in conjunction with the hearing, only $38 million—or three percent of the NNI budget—went towards EHS, but that figure is likely overstated because of ambiguous reporting standards used by researchers. Robinson called for a better system to keep track of EHS spending. Committee members said they will revisit the EHS budget during the authorization process.

The subcommittee also invited outside experts from industry and the health sectors to explain their respective concerns about the NNI.

David Rejeski, Director of the Foresight and Governance Project and Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, used a tube of Korean toothpaste laden with silver nanoparticles as a prop during his testimony, highlighting the fact that little is known about health risks associated with nanotechnology. Rejeski believes the U.S. oversight system is failing to test for possible risks just as more nanoproducts are hitting the market. He said that many nanotech companies are asking for federal guidance or regulations on EHS issues so they can press ahead with commercialization without fear of retroactive federal intervention. For the NNI reauthorization bill, Rejeski recommended an external advisory board for better transparency; a comprehensive strategy for the Initiative; and efforts to improve public awareness, so as not to hinder commercialization.

Committee members were mostly receptive to the recommendations of witnesses. They echoed many of the same concerns, calling for improved EHS spending and tracking; increased spending in nanotechnology research for renewable energy and fuel production; improving federal standards; and highlighting the need for a positive public awareness campaign to avoid a backlash similar to that suffered by genetically modified foods.

Image: NASA

“Atlantis is grounded till January 2 at the earliest.” (60 Second Science)

The public isn’t worried about nanotech risks; scientists are. But it turns out that “the public trusts industry and university scientists more than governmental bodies, regulatory agencies and the media.” Matthew Nisbet points to Peter Rodgers’s editorial (subscription) in Nature Nanotech on the opportunity to frame scientific communication on nanotechnology (hint: forget the details, and get help from professional communicators if needed). (Framing Science)

Sorting through the empirical research on the “wide variety of social factors that affect (or are affected by) sex differences in math and science.” (Cognitive Daily)

Hill Heat, Dot Earth, and Climate Progress all cover the Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies and speeches for the IPCC and Al Gore “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

Venture Capitalists with money in cleantech start-ups at the Always On Venture Summit West were not optimistic that the U.S. government will enact carbon caps in the near future. (Wired Science)

To grapple with this gap between research and regulation, the Center on Nanotechnology and Society held its 2nd Annual Conference on Nanopolicy this past Friday. Moderated by the Society’s director Nigel Cameron, the conference opened with presentations from researchers, scholars, and staffers, each offering a different view on how nanotechnology will change the way we live, work, govern, maintain security, and respond to disasters.

Bill Kojola of the AFL-CIO told the audience that those who work with nanotechnologies in manufacturing keep asking, “Is this the next asbestos?” He also emphasized that the AFL-CIO does not have a lot of researchers to investigate the possible workplace hazards of nanotech and ensure the safety of workers.

Charles Rubin, a philosopher from Duquesne University claimed that in discussing Nanotech Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues, the ethical questions are paramount. In his vision, nanotech ethics cannot say that “anything goes.” Rather, he said that policy-makers must be resolute and decide what is “good” nanotechnology and promote it.

A second series of presentations focused on the public understanding of nanotech. Margaret Glass, the communications coordinator for Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network said that museums are well-poised to inform the public about nanotech science because that public puts a high level of trust into them. She cited survey data indicating that over 80% of respondents say that they trust museums.

Dietram Scheufele, communications professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, rejected the idea that public understanding is about education; rather, he said, it’s about framing. He explained that the general public cannot be expected to learn all of the details of nanotech risk, so it is up to scientists to frame the risks and benefits of nanotechnology in familiar terms before political groups do the framing for them.

Jonathan Moreno, Science Progress Editor-In-Chief, explained that context often alters acceptable risk—and can adversely effect policy decisions. For instance, during a time of war, when the survival of the country is at stake, the state may consider certain kinds of risky human-subject research acceptable; whereas in times of peace, the state would consider that same research to pose an unacceptable risk. “The state’s primary prerogative,” he argued, “is not to protect the physical security of its citizens. Its prerogative is to protect itself.”

In order to address some of these issues, the Center on Nanotechnology and Society will hold a conference tomorrow in Washington, D.C. (Full disclosure: Science Progress Editor-and-Chief Jonathan Moreno is a speaker.)

In a recent study, Dietram Scheufele found that experts reflect greater concern than the public about nanotechnology (Via Framing Science). Another study concluded that in discussion of similar science policy issues, absent a conflicting viewpoint, safety reassurance from scientists and governmental officials satisfies the public opinion. Glenn McGee, director of the Alden March Bioethics Institute, points out that any field with the potential to effect both scientific research and industry necessitates responsible public dialogue—and the time is now, as the public is demonstrating interest in nanotech possibilities.

A 2006 UNESCO report concluded that although research outcomes will impact developing nations, weak or nonexistent policies pose a hazard to the world community. John Daly, a UNESCO board member, explains that because nanoparticles behave differently than materials in bulk, scientists need to explore their potential hazards. In addition to the ethical concerns associated with nanotechnology, there are unaddressed practical and safety concerns including: nomenclature, definitions, and standards; hazard characterization; exposure and effects assessment; environmental fate, transport, and persistence; and measurement, sampling, and monitoring of nanomaterials.

The potential for nanotech requires that international dialogue involve both developed and developing nations (some 44 nanotechnology labs operate outside of the US). A recent call for regulations in India reflects this concern, where potential problems for ongoing research must balance unanswered ethical questions with $225 million in government-funded support for the new technologies.

In the United States, the National Nanotechnology Initiative, a multi-agency organization leads the government in its development of policy and distribution of financial resources. With $1.44 billion in funding allocated for nanotechnology in 2008 and just $59 million allocated for the study of ethical, legal, and social concerns, the U.S. stands to face problems stemming from substandard regulatory preparation. NNI published a report on the regulation of nanotechnology; however, actualization of any recommendations will prove problematic and involves navigating the logistics, staffing, and other constraints of its 25 member agencies. Of concern is the lack of any individual regulatory agency for any area of nanotechnology.

Image credit: Michael Ströck

Kanzius’s technique proved highly effective in early preclinical trials at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. In lab experiments, two lines of liver cancer cells and one pancreatic cancer cell line were completely destroyed after being injected with nanotubes and exposed to radiofrequency energy. Carbon nanotubes are hollow cylinders of pure carbon that measure about a billionth of a meter, or one nanometer, across. A similar technique called radiofrequency ablation has been used for a number of years to treat tumors in the body. However, the novel technique developed by Kanzius makes radiofrequency cancer treatment much less damaging to surrounding tissue.

One problem, unfortunately, is that scientists don’t have an accurate method for targeting cancer cells. Researchers are currently in the process of searching for acceptable molecular targets in the tumor tissue onto which the nanotubes can bind. It has been difficult to find targets unique to cancer cells and researchers must resolve this issue before the nanotube technique can live up to its promise of being an effective and noninvasive procedure. For these reasons, the scientists believe that clinical trials are still three to four years away.

Stem cell research is currently in the spotlight, but this new technique reminds us both of the promise of other treatments under development, as well as the potential for nanotechnology in the medical sciences. The treatment, even though still at the preclinical stage, is evidence that even far-fetched scientific ideas can and do become successful.

Nanotechnology is fertile new field with a host of unexplored risks, so how should the government go about cultivating it? This was the major issue raised by Dr. Richard Denison, a Senior Scientist in Environmental Defense, who testified at yesterday’s hearing before the House Committee on Science and Technology’s Subcommittee on Research and Science Education, on the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI). The balance of potential and uncertainty is one of the reasons why the development of research priorities for risk assessment of nanotechnology has moved at a glacial pace. Denison recommended the government divide the work of nanotech promotion and risk assessment between two complementary but entirely separate offices to avoid conflicts of interest. Denison also recommended inter-agency coordination of research into the Environmental, Health, and Safety (EHS) concerns within the NNI.

The NNI involves 26 agencies and received $1.35 billion in FY 2007, $180 million of which has gone to EHS research between FY’s 2005 and 2008. In 2003, a National Environmental and Health Implications working group set about prioritizing and implementing the research needed to ensure “responsible development and use of nanotechnology.” The group’s aim was to establish a prioritized list of research goals in Spring of 2006, but it was delayed until September 2006 and the resulting list was not prioritized. A narrower list of priorities finally appeared in August 2007 with a narrowed-down list of priorities.

Dr. Vicki Colving, Professor & Executive Director Rice University & International Council on Nanotechnology Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, emphasized the necessity of coordinating and “harmonizing” research. For instance, the community currently lacks a consensus on the toxicity of nanotubes, which inhibits the ability of the NNI to assess research risks.

Dr. Clayton Teague, Director of the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office, assured the Committee that the office will release a comprehensive report in the next few months listing EHS projects. The office is currently seeking consensus on standards from multiple agencies, including the Office of Management and Budget, as well as international bodies. In contrast to Denison, Teague advised against forming “a centralized office with budgetary authority to oversee the NNI’s EHS research program,” since it would lack the breadth of technical expertise that is available across all of the involved agencies and would undermine the EHS responsibilities within and between agencies.

The NNI provides a brochure outlining the benefits and some of the general risks of nanotechnology. They list the many possible uses for nanoparticles such as lighting, energy, water filtration, medical treatments, and material durability.

Tuesday

House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, and the Global Environment: “Renewable Energy and the Global Environment.” 2 p.m.

House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property: “Stifling or Stimulating – The Role of Gene Patents in Research and Genetic Testing.” 2 p.m.

House Science and Technology Subcommittee on Energy and Environment: “Research to Improve Water-Use Efficiency and Conservation: Technologies and Practices.” 2 p.m.

Wednesday

House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Internet: “The Status of the Digital Television Transition – Part 3.” 9:30 a.m.

House Science and Technology Subcommittee on Research and Science Education: “Research on Environmental and Safety Impacts of Nanotechnology: Current Status of Planning and Implementation under the National Nanotechnology Initiative.” 10 a.m.

House Science and Technology Committee: “Aviation Safety: Can NASA Do More to Protect the Public?” 1 p.m.

Thursday

House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Government Management, Organization, and Procurement: “Too Many Cooks” Coordinating Federal and State Health IT.” 2 p.m.

Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee: “Protecting the U.S. From Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis: Reinvesting in Control and New Tools Research.” 10 a.m.

The Bush Administration continues to censor scientists. The AP has the latest on revisions made to the testimony of CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding, who testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on Tuesday on the health impacts of climate change. The original testimony was 14 pages; the White House hacked it down to four; six made it to the Senate. The Knight Science Tracker, ThinkProgress, and Wired Science have more.

“More than half of Americans believe that Internet content such as video should be controlled in some way by the government.” Selections from the results of a 463 Communications/Zogby International poll on U.S. attitudes on the Internet.

The Bayh-Dole Act grants intellectual property rights to universities for projects developed with federal funds. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing today to consider changes to the legislation. At issue: limitations on the earnings from licensing royalties that labs can keep; and the need to consider that the exclusive patent model may work for drug development, but not for telecommunications or forthcoming energy technologies.

The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies has been holding an online conference the past two days on the impact of nanotechnology on consumer products. Yesterday conferees discussed the possible applications of nanotechnologies; today they have been looking at regulation and oversight strategies.

Major research libraries are falling into two camps: those that allow Google and Microsoft to digitize their book collections, and those that place their knowledge stores in the hands of the Open Content Alliance.