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May 13, 2003 — It’s fashionable for laypeople to imagine nanotech’s “dark side,” as best-selling science fiction authors and environmental activist groups use public forums to fire off their warning shots. A little more quietly, there are a few nanotech-watchers who are just as concerned about the dangers nanotech could pose to humankind, but prefer to use dispassionate, nonpartisan data.
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Mike Treder and Chris Phoenix of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN) spend their time thinking about the coming age of advanced molecular manufacturing and its potential to shake the foundations of our global socioeconomic structure.
Simultaneously, Richard Smith and Mark Menna, a pair of policy wonks, are diving into the fray in D.C. and founding what they say is the first organization dedicated exclusively to nanotechnology and government. They created their Nanotechnology Policy Forum because they’re concerned about the quality of the current nanotech debates. Environmental and societal issues are being aired, they say, but the media attention to it lacks substance.
For now, the forum is composed of just Smith and Menna, but they hope to build the nonprofit into a policy force in Washington, as lawmakers and bureaucrats struggle with how — and whether — to squeeze different nanotechnology issues into regulatory boxes.
“There are different voices about the direction that different groups think nanotechnology should take. Without dialogue about those issues, with each group just proceeding independently, we think there is a loss,” Menna said.
Menna is a lawyer at the Federal Trade Commission, specializing in antitrust. Smith works for the Institute for Alternative Futures in Alexandria, Va., a nonprofit research organization where he focuses on nanotechnology and other emerging technologies.
The forum will remain rigorously nonpartisan, Smith and Menna said. The point is to air the range of issues as they arise and give all parties an equal voice.
Smith said the timing is right for the forum. “Where you have opportunity you often have things that are scary, often because they aren’t understood,” he said. “We had Bill Joy’s article (in Wired Magazine in 2000), then this year we had (Michael Crichton’s novel) `Prey,’ soon we’ll have `Prey’ the paperback and `Prey’ the movie, and Bill Joy’s got a book coming out.”
Both the novel “Prey” and Joy’s article, called “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” associate nanotechnology with miniature robots that eventually destroy the human race.
At the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, Treder and Phoenix are less concerned with nanobots and more concerned about human interaction with the technology. They recently published an outline of specific dangers they foresee in development of advanced nanotechnology. Among them: economic disruption, terrorism, black markets and unstable arms races.
Phoenix lives in Arizona and previously worked as a software engineer. Treder resides in New York City and has a background in business and nonprofit work. The two have never actually met. Treder and Phoenix began discussing nanotech in e-mail correspondences. A year ago, Phoenix sent Treder his research on the possibility of rapid development of molecular nanotechnology (MNT); Treder replied in an e-mail bearing the subject line, “Holy hell!”
Before the world will heed CRN’s warnings, however, people have to be convinced that MNT is indeed possible; as of now, it remains controversial.
James Von Ehr, founder and chief executive of Texas nanotech company Zyvex Corp., sees the challenge as difficult but feasible. “There are major technical hurdles for doing molecularly precise manufacturing with today’s tools and knowledge,” he said. “Given today’s technology and the amount of effort required to achieve our objective, molecularly precise manufacturing looks to be a decade or more away.”
On the other side of the debate are some prominent nanotech researchers like George Whitesides. The Harvard chemistry professor uses one word — “nonsense” — to describe claims that MNT could be developed soon and nanofactories could make products. “I do not think that molecular manufacturing, in the sense of the assembler, is possible for a long time, possibly forever,” Whitesides said. “One can, of course, move atoms around with an STM (Scanning Tunneling Microscope) tip, but that is an entirely different thing.”
The best way to settle the issue, according to CRN, is a government-funded feasibility study. In fact, Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute — a more established nonprofit nanotech think tank — pushed for such a study during congressional testimony in April.
At the same time, the Nanotechnology Policy Forum is busy setting up public debates outside government forums. The group will hold its first planning meeting in June, Menna said, and will have a board of directors representing different interests in the nanotechnology policy debate. The first few meetings will be held in Washington, but Smith said he wants the organization to hold events across the country soon.
Mike Roco, director of the federal government’s National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), said the forum “is a good step at the right time.”
“A key roadblock to the success of nanotechnology would be public opinion,” he said in a Capitol Hill hallway after a recent House hearing on nanotechnology. “At the moment, most of the people who will determine its future are not yet informed about it. There is a need to have a qualified forum to have a debate.”
Once ideas for effective policy are in place, CRN would like to see creation of a single international program for advanced nanotech development. “Because the impacts and the risks are going to be shared on a global level,” Treder said, “we believe that the project should be undertaken as a global challenge.”
Treder said he believes nanotech’s potential to benefit humanity is so great, every effort must be made to get the technology safely into the hands of those who need it the most.
“There are so many people in other nations now who are trying to survive every day,” Treder said. “If you remove those obstacles and give them the chance to use their intellectual capability instead of just trying to survive, who knows what other innovations we might come up with?”