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NEW YORK, May 20, 2004 — As the NanoBusiness Alliance’s annual conference concluded Tuesday, lawyer Daniel Ritter came to this conclusion: “These are the best of times, and worst of times for nanotech.”
The good news, said the attorney who represents the Alliance in Washington, D.C., is that nanotech businesses are growing and the government has made the science a U.S. strategic priority.
But with growing media coverage about nanotech’s potential risks, and a movie version of Michael Crichton’s nano-horror novel “Prey” in the works, Ritter and other leaders wrestled with how the industry should respond to critics.
“There are also concerns about the export of dual-use nanotechnologies with defense or weapons implications,” said Ritter.
If the industry fails to persuade the U.S. public that nanotechnology is safe, he warned, the United States could risk losing its leadership position. And while Ritter reported that support in Congress is broad, it is also shallow because many legislators do not fully understand nanotech.
L. Val Giddings, vice president for food and agriculture at the Biotechnology Industry Organization in Washington and a former geneticist with the Agriculture Department, said that nanotechnology is an imprecise concept that will “be defined by those who feel threatened by it” if supporters don’t preempt them. To that end, Giddings suggested the nanotech community publish a statement of principles that would address public safety.
Phillip Bond, U.S. commerce undersecretary, responded that considerations of nanotech’s societal risks have been a part of the National Nanotechnology Initiative since its inception, and are built into recently enacted $3.7 billion legislation.
He added that “there’s a false assumption that because something is ‘nano,’ federal regulations don’t apply.” All federal rules that control the safety of drugs, products and materials equally apply to nanoparticles, he said.
Several observers noted that the real problem is the public’s limited understanding of what nanotechnology is or the social benefits it may offer. “Fear is a product of ignorance,” Bond said.
One fear nanotech advocates expressed is that the movie version of “Prey” might immortalize misperceptions that have proliferated for years in books and movies and on television.
The NanoBusiness Alliance’s departing director, Mark Modzelewski, said he hadn’t been particularly concerned when the book came out — “because nobody reads” — but said the impact of a movie version could be significant.
Melody Haller of the Antenna Group, a public relations firm that represents a number of nanotech companies and Small Times, also raised concern that “marginalizing” people such Eric Drexler and others who believe in the feasibility of molecular manufacturing might create “heroic martyrs” for nanotech opponents to exploit. Drexler is founder of the Foresight Institute and author of the influential 1986 book, “Engines of Creation.”
Modzelewski, normally an outspoken Drexler critic, was unusually courtly toward the group. “Foresight has created some frameworks and guidelines for going forward that people should be looking at,” he said.
In an interview after the policy panel, Sean Murdock, the NanoBusiness Alliance’s incoming executive director, said that with respect to dangers, real or potential, the nanotech world must be proactive about studying safety issues. He also said he believed such risks can be quantified and protected against.
“We can identify what risks exist, when and where they may occur and what their magnitude might be,” Murdock. More important, he emphasized, such measurable risks are overwhelmingly outweighed by the broad societal benefits nanotechnology could bring, such as affordable solar power, more effective water purification and leaps in medical technology.
“Today the biggest source of harmful nanoparticles is combustion,” he said, speaking of soot spewed by vehicle engines and power plants. Companies such as Nanosys Inc. (Profile, News, Web) and Konarka Technologies (Profile, News, Web) developing low-cost solar materials, he argued, could reduce this century-old problem.
“Like any complex adaptive system, society learns by doing,” Murdock said. In that process, what is essential to avoid is the “truly catastrophic,” something “irrecoverable that would develop too fast for us to change.” Murdock said he will focus on helping the public understand that “it is good business to understand and avoid risk” even while nanotechnology takes on some of human civilization’s thorniest challenges, such as renewable energy and better health care.
But as Giddings noted about previous controversies over genetically modified food, if fear wins over promise, good intentions aren’t enough. “We got bushwhacked. We thought people would embrace a technology that eliminated tons of pesticides, that it would speak for itself. We were in a reactive mode too much of the time, so it became like trying to turn the Titanic away from the iceberg.”
Finally, while Giddings said that messages about nanotechnology need to be “honest, powerful and simple,” he also reminded the audience that “the moral high ground is presumed to be in the hands of critics.”