Category: General

Framing nanotech: products, process, or program?

If you are a regulator or policy maker considering the possible impacts of nanotechnology, should you consider it solely in terms of the products it produces, should you think of it as a distinct process for making things, or should you ask about the more general socio-economic program of which it is part? This question is suggested by Sheila Jasanoff’s excellent new book, Designs on Nature. This book, recommended on Soft Machines the other day by James Wilsdon (see also James’s review of the book for the Financial Times), is a highly perceptive comparative study of the different ways in which the politics of biotechnology and genetic modification played out in the USA, the UK and Germany. Jasanoff finds one origin of the differences between the experience in the three countries in the different ways in which the technology was framed. In the USA, the emphasis was on asking whether the products of biotechnology were safe. In the UK, the issue was framed more broadly; the question was whether the process of genetic modification was in itself a cause for concern. In Germany, meanwhile, discussion of biotechnology could never escape the shadow of the complicity of German biomedical science with the National Socialist program, and the horrors that emerged from a state dedicated to the proposition than all men are not created equal. In this context, it was tempting to see biotechnology as part of a program in which science and a controlling, ordering state came together to subjugate both citizens and nature.

Since policy-makers, academics and activists are all looking at the unfolding debate around nanotechnology through the lens of the earlier GM debates, it’s worth asking how far this analysis can be applied to nanotechnology. The product-centred view is clearly in the ascendency in the USA, where the debate is centred almost exclusively over the issue of the possible toxicity of nanoparticles. But the process-centred view is not really managing to establish itself anywhere. The problem is, of course, that nanotechnology does not present a distinct process in the way that genetic modification does. This is despite the early rhetoric of the National Nanotechnology Initiative – the slogan “building the world atom-by-atom” does suggest that nanotechnology offers a fundamentally different way of doing things, but the reality, of course, is that today’s nanotechnology products are made by engineering processes which are only incremental developments of ones that have gone before. It remains to be seen whether a radically different nanotechnology will emerge which will make this framing more relevant.

Should we, then, worry about nanotechnology as part of a broader, socio-economic program? This is clearly the central position of anti-nanotechnology campaigning groups like the ETC group. They may find the nano-toxicity issue to be a convenient stick to beat governments and nano-industry with, but their main argument is not with the technology in itself, but with the broader issues of globalization and liberal economics. Of course, many of those most strongly in favour of nanotechnology have their own program, too – the idea of transhumanism, with its high profile adherents such as Ray Kurzweil. It’s possible that opposition to nanotechnology will increasingly come to be framed in terms of opposition to the transhumanist program, along the lines of Bill McKibben’s book Enough.

Nanotechnology in the New Straits Times

My friend, colleague and collaborator from across the road in the chemistry department here at Sheffield, Tony Ryan, went to Malaysia and Singapore the week before last, and one result was this article in the New Straits Times, in which he gives a succinct summary of the current state of play in nanotechnology. He was rewarded by a mildly cross email this morning from K. Eric Drexler. Actually I think Tony’s interview is pretty fair to Drexler – he gives him a big place in the history of the subject, and on the vexed question of nanobots, he says “This popular misconception has been popularised by people who misunderstood the fantastic book Engines of Creation by K. Eric Drexler.”

There was also a useful corrective to those of us worried that nanotechnology is getting overexposed. The writer describes how the article originated from a “short, balding man in the public relations industry” who said about nanotechnology that it’s “”the latest buzzword in the field of science and is making waves globally”. On the contrary, our journalist says… “Buzzword? It most certainly is not. My editor and I looked at each other and agreed that it is more a word that one hears ONLY ever so occasionally. “

The Stalinists of public engagement…

The recent pamphlet from Demos on the need for public engagement about nanotechnology and other new technologies has received forthright criticism from the editor of Research Fortnight, William Bown. The original editorial raised the spectre of Lysenko, and accused advocates of public engagement of being “worse than Stalinists”. One of the authors of the Demos paper, James Wilsdon, has energetically responded. The resulting exchange of letters will be published in Research Fortnight, but those readers who unaccountably have forgotten to renew their subscription to that organ can read them on the Demos blog.

I’m not going to attempt to summarise Bown’s argument here (mainly because I find it rather difficult to follow). But I will single out one statement he makes to take issue with. Arguing that public engagement simply provides a mechanism to help governments avoid making difficult decisions, he says “The question for these two [Tony Blair and Gordon Brown], and their companions in Parliament, is not whether they think science is shiny and exciting; it is whether they back the deployment of nanotechnology.” This seems to me to combine naiveity about politics with a real misunderstanding of the nature of the science. All the debates about nanotechnology should have made one thing absolutely clear: nanotechnology is not a single thing (like nuclear power, say) that we can choose to use or to turn away from. It’s a whole variety of different technologies and potential technologies, with an equally wide range of potential applications. Choices need to be made – are being made right now, in fact – about which research avenues should be pursued, and which should be left to others, and one of the key roles of public engagement is to inform those choices.

More on Nanojury UK

Here are a few more links about Nanojury UK, the citizens’ jury on nanotechnology which has just reported its verdict.

The press release about the results, from Greenpeace.
An article about it, from the German newspaper die Tageszeitung (in German). Thanks to author Niels Boeing for letting me know about this.
Detailed commentary on the results and the launch day from David Berube (research director of NanoScience and Technology Studies at the University of South Carolina).

Finally, here’s a complete list of my posts on the process as it unfolded:
The launch
Week 1
Week 3
Finalising the conclusions
The verdict.

Nanotechnology Engagement Group

I was in London on Monday for the first meeting of the Nanotechnology Engagement Group (NEG), a body funded by the UK government to coordinate activities around public engagement and the discussion of social and ethical issues in the context of nanotechnology. The establishment of the body was announced in a rather low-key way in the summer, when the government issued its draft strategy public engagement on nanotechnologies. The group is being run by the think-tank Involve, and I’m chairing it.

Here are a few first impressions, mostly of the potential pitfalls that it’s easy to imagine this enterprise falling into. The first is that it might cement the trend already identified by Demos, and contribute to a simultaneous professionalization and marginalization of the public engagement field. One can easily imagine NEG developing as a forum in which the professionals cheerfully discuss at length the methodological advantages of citizens’ juries against consensus conferences or focus groups, while failing to make any real impact either on the development of science policy or on the wider public discourse about technology as it’s carried out through the media.

The second is the tension that exists between the idea of public engagement and the idea of “engaging stakeholders”. A very popular way of doing some sort of wider consultation about something like technology is to assemble a bunch of “stakeholders” – regulators, industry groups, consultancy organisations, and advocacy groups. I have deep worries about the representativeness of such groups on all sides. There’s an unwillingness of the private sector to put its collective head above the parapet, on the one hand, and on the other there’s a tendency to assume that NGOs, sometimes representing very narrow constituencies, have a mandate to represent the concerns of a wider public. It’s tempting to view the results of such consultations as being much more representative than they are; when so many people are unwilling or unable to speak the voice of anyone who is willing and motivated to say anything at all ends up with far too much weight. This, to my mind, is one of the main strengths of processes like citizens’ juries – done well, you should get something that represents the views of the public much more accurately than an advocacy group.

Finally, there is the question of what the public, in these engagement exercises, are actually being asked to decide on. The drawback of this kind of upstream engagement is that it is not clear what the outcomes of the technology might be. Maybe we need to start doing some serious scenario construction to try and present a range of plausible futures to focus the discussion down a bit.

All these issues come into sharp focus with the launch of the findings of Nanojury UK (see here for previous reports on this), which took place today at the headquarters of the Guardian. I’ll be writing my impressions about the launch event tomorrow.

‘Twas on the good ship Venus…

If you’ve enjoyed the bout of transatlantic name-calling that my piece on public engagement produced (generally along the well-worn lines of Europeans from Venus versus Martian Americans), you might want to look at this exchange on the Foresight Institute’s Nanodot blog. Here Foresight VP Christine Peterson enthusiastically agrees with my not wholly serious suggestion that the origin of the UK’s aversion to the positive vision of Drexlerian nanotechnology can be traced to the generally pessimistic and miserabilist disposition of the inhabitants of this rain-sodden archipelago, and I desperately try and extract myself from the hole I’ve dug myself into.

Model Railways

I’ve been in Leeds for a few days for the biennial conference of the Polymer Physics Group of the UK’s Institute of Physics. Among many interesting talks, the one that stood out for me was the first – an update from Andrew Turberfield on his efforts to make a molecular motor from DNA.

Turberfield, who is at the Oxford IRC in Bionanotechnology, is building on the original work from Ned Seeman, exploiting the remarkable self-assembling properties of DNA to make nanoscale structures and devices. A few years ago, Turberfield, working with Bernie Yurke at Lucent Bell Labs, designed and built a DNA nano-machine (see here for a PDF preprint of the original Nature paper), and in 2003 they published a paper describing a free-running motor powered by the energy released when two complementary strands of DNA meet to make a section of double helix (abstract here).

This motor doesn’t actually do anything, apart from sit around in solution cyclically changing shape. What Turberfield wants to do now is make something a bit like the linear motors common in cell biology, in which the motor molecule moves along a track, often carrying a cargo. To make this kind of molecular railway, Turberfield’s scheme is to prepare a track along a surface by grafting strands of DNA to it. The engine is another DNA molecule; what needs to be done is get some scheme whereby the engine molecule is systematically passed along from strand to strand.

His first effort, in collaboration with Duke University’s John Reif, involves using enzymes to alternately cut DNA strands and rejoin them in a sequence that has the effect of making a short strand of DNA move linearly in one direction. In this case, it’s the energy used by the enzyme that joins two bits of DNA that makes the motor run. The full paper is here (PDF). In motor mark 2, it’s a so-called nicking enzyme that makes the engine move, and the directionality is imposed by the fact that the track is destroyed in the path of the engine (abstract here, subscription probably required for full article). What Andrew really wants to do, though, is have a motor that is solely powered by the energy released when DNA strands make a helix, which doesn’t chew up the track behind it, and which doesn’t involve the use of any biological components like enzymes. He has a scheme, and he is confident that it’s not far off working.

These motors are inefficient and slow in their current form. But they are important, because they work on the same basic principles as biological motors, principles which are very different to the mechanical principles that underly the motors we are familiar with. They rely on the Brownian motion and stickiness of the nanoscale environment. But because of the simplicity of the base pair interaction, the calculations you need to do to predict whether the motor will work or not are feasibly simple. By learning to make model railways from these simple, modular components, we’ll learn the design rules that will enable us to make a wider variety of practical nanoscale motors.

On the road again

I’m sorry that I’ve left my blog unattended for a few days; I went away and forgot that I’d changed the blog’s password, so I couldn’t get to it from my laptop.

I’ve been doing a whistlestop tour of the Celtic capitals – to Dublin for the meeting of the British Association, where I was appearing in a panel discussion about whether we should use nanotechnology for human enhancement. Then to Edinburgh, where the EuroNanoForum was discussing nanotechnology and the health of the European citizen. I gave a talk in the session on converging technologies, recorded an interview for French radio, and went to an interesting session on public engagement, after which I had the pleasure of meeting my fellow nano-blogger, David Berube. Then, over a supper of haggis, neeps and tatties, I was subjected to what I thought was rather an aggressive interrogation from some of my fellow European citizens about the quality of the British contribution to international food culture. I’ll post something more substantive tomorrow.

Farewell to Nanobot

Howard Lovy announced last week that he’s drawing a line under his popular and entertaining blog Howard Lovy’s Nanobot. I guess this is the natural consequence of his transition from nanobusiness gamekeeper to poacher, with his new post as Director of Communications at the nanotechnology company Arrowhead Research. I’ve never met Howard in person, though I’ve felt I’ve got to know him through exchanges on our respective blogs and through some email correspondence; I’m delighted that he’s found a niche to use his talents in the nanotechnology sector and I wish him all the best in this new phase of his career.

I’ll miss Nanobot. I certainly didn’t agree with everything Howard said, and I wish he’d got to understand the scientific community better. But it’s been a provocative and interesting read, and its emphasis on the way the idea of nanotechnology is being interpreted in the wider world has been helpful and salutory.

Making life from the bottom up

I wrote below about Craig Venter’s vision of synthetic biology – taking an existing, very simple, organism, reducing its complexity even further by knocking out unneccessary genes, and then inserting new genetic material to accomplish the functions you want. One could think of this as a kind of top-down synthetic biology; one is still using the standard mechanisms and functions of natural biology, but one reprogrammes them as desired. Could there be a bottom-up synthetic biology, in which one designs entirely new structures and systems for metabolism and reproduction?

One approach to this goal has been pioneered by Steven Benner at the University of Florida. He’s been concentrating on creating synthetic genetic systems by analogy with DNA, but he’s not shy about where he wants his research to go: “The ultimate goal of a program in synthetic biology is to develop chemical systems capable of self-reproduction and Darwinian-like evolution.” He’s recently written a review of this kind of approach in Nature Genetics Reviews (subscription only): Synthetic biology.

David Deamer, from UC Santa Cruz, has a slightly different take on the same problem in another recent review, this time in Trends in Biotechnology (again, subscription only, I’m afraid). “A giant step towards artificial life?” concentrates on the idea of creating artificial cells by using self-assembling lipids to make liposomes (the very same creatures that L’Oreal uses in its expensive face creams). Encapsulated within these liposomes are some of the basic elements of metabolism, such as the mechanisms for protein synthesis. How close can this approach get to creating something like a living, reproducing organism? In Deamer’s words: “Everything in the system grows and reproduces except the catalytic macromolecules themselves, the polymerase enzymes or ribosomes. Every other part of the system can grow and reproduce, but the catalysts get left behind. This is the final challenge: to encapsulate a system of macromolecules that can make more of themselves, a molecular version of von Neumann’s replicating machine.” He sees a glimmer of hope in the work of David Bartel at MIT, who has made a RNA enzyme that synthesizes short RNA sequences, pointing the way to RNA-based self-replication.

But all these approaches still follow the pattern set by the life we know about on earth; they depend on the self-assembling properties of a familiar repertoire of lipids and macromolecules, like DNA, RNA and proteins, in watery environments. Could you do without water entirely? Benner is quoted in an article by Philip Ball in this week’s Nature (Water and life: Seeking the solution, subscription required) arguing that you can: “Water is a terrible solvent for life…. We are working to create alternative darwinian systems based on fundamentally different chemistries. We are using different solvent systems as a way to get a precursor for life on Earth.”