Category: General

Nanotechnology – with nature or against it?

I’ve been covering two big debates about nanotechnology here. One the on hand, there’s the question of the relative merits of Drexler’s essentially mechanical vision of nanotechnology and the more biologically inspired soft and biomimetic approaches. On the other, we see the efforts of campaigning groups like ETC to paint nanotechnology as the next step after genetic modification in humanity’s efforts to degrade and control the natural world. Although these debates at first sight look very different, they both revolve around issues of control and our proper relationship with the natural world.

These issues are identified and situated in a deep historical context in a very perceptive article by Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, of the Philosophy Department in the Université Paris X. The article, Two Cultures of Nanotechnology?, is in HYLE-the International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry, Vol. 10, No.2 (2004).

The whole article is well worth reading, but this extract gets to the heart of the matter:

“There is nothing new in the current artificialization of nature. Already in antiquity, there were two different and occasionally conflicting views of technology. On the one hand, the arts or technai were considered as working against nature, as contrary to nature. This meaning of the term para-physin provided the ground for repeated condemnations of mechanics and alchemy. On the other hand, the arts – especially agriculture, cooking, and medicine – were considered as assisting or even improving on nature by employing the dynameis or powers of nature. In the former perspective, the artisan, like Plato’s demiurgos, builds up a world by imposing his own rules and rationality on a passive matter. Technology is a matter of control. In the latter perspective the artisan is more like the ship-pilot at sea. He conducts or guides forces and processes supplied by nature, thus revealing the powers inherent in matter. Undoubtedly the mechanicist [i.e. Drexlerian] model of nanotechnology belongs to the demiurgic tradition. It is a technology fascinated by the control and the overtaking of nature.”

Bensaude-Vincent argues soft and biomimetic approaches to nanotechnology fall more naturally into that second culture, conducting or guiding forces and processes supplied by nature, thus revealing the powers inherent in matter.

Nanojury UK – week 3

The citizens jury about nanotechnology that I’m involved in (see here for my last report) has now finished its third week. In week 2 the jurors heard a pair of witnesses from the sceptical side of the debate; Jim Thomas from ETC, and Charles Medawar from Social Audit, a group devoted to questioning the relationship between medicine and the pharmaceutical industry. In week 3, the jury heard from Tony Ryan, a chemistry professor (and colleague) from the University of Sheffield, and David Bott, an industrial chemist who’s had senior positions in BP, Courtaulds and ICI and who now divides his time between advising the DTI, a venture capital company and a couple of nanotechnology start-ups.

I went along to last night’s session to see how things were going. The jury now very much has the bit between its teeth; they’ve found some interesting lines of argument to pursue and are assiduously comparing the different positions of the witnesses they’ve heard, particularly on issues like the motives and trustworthyness of industry. A surprise (to me) visitor last night was Tom Fielden, the environment correspondent of the flagship BBC radio news program “Today”. He was recording some of the proceedings to use in a piece about the Nanojury that they’ll run on the morning the findings are announced. It’s excellent to see that this process is getting some serious interest from the mainstream media.

There’s one more witness to go now, then the jurors have three more evening sessions to discuss their findings and prepare their report. I think it’s going to make interesting (and at the moment, quite unpredictable) reading.

Science and Public Affairs

The summer edition of Science and Public Affairs, a magazine published by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, has some interesting articles about the debate around the social implications of nanotechnology (when I looked the website hadn’t been updated to the latest edition, so I don’t know which of these articles will be available online).

There’s a group of three short pieces of reaction to the UK Government’s response to the Royal Society Report “Nanoscience and nanotechnologies: opportunities and uncertainties”, one from me, one from the ETC group’s Jim Thomas, and one from the Royal Society’s study’s chair, Ann Dowling. The first two of these will already be familiar to readers of Howard Lovy’s Nanobot (if I was a proper blogger I’d probably insert something here about the mainstream media struggling to keep up).

More timely is an article by Nick Pidgeon and Tee Rogers-Hayden comparing the way public engagement was handled in the debate about genetic modification with what’s been done with nanotechnology so far. Pidgeon and Rogers-Hayden are social scientists based at the University of East Anglia; Pidgeon was the social scientist member of the Royal Society panel and both were involved in evaluating the success or otherwise of GM Nation?, the large scale public engagement programme run by the UK government on the subject of agricultural biotechnology. They found a lot to criticise about GM Nation; the debate was held too late, with commercialisation imminent and public attitudes already polarised, and the participants weren’t representative of the population as a whole.

In the nanotechnology debate, some of these problems can be avoided – the process has been begun much earlier in the development cycle, and it is clear that public opinion is not yet polarised to anything like the degree seen with GM. But the upstream engagement we are beginning to see with nanotechnology will bring its own difficulties, precisely because some of the applications and implications of the technology are not yet clear, and because broader issues of a much more political nature (who controls technology? who benefits? who do we trust?) become more prominent.

But the article highlights an absolutely central issue with upstream engagement processes, that I’m currently spending a lot of time thinking about in the context of Nanojury UK (I should note that Pidgeon is on the steering committee of this project, and Rogers-Hayden has been observing a number of the sessions). This is the crucial role of information about the science. How can one ensure that the participants of the process have good quality information, while ensuring that the way the information is presented doesn’t introduce bias? The credibility of the process depends on all sides of the debate feeling that their views have been fairly represented, but there’s a danger that this will lead to potential conflicts between holders of fundamentally different views about the status of scientific expertise.

Why, one might ask, do we not simply issue the participants in these processes with a pack containing all the serious and well-considered documents that have been produced on nanotechnology, such as the Royal Society report? Quite apart from the important point that most of the population hasn’t learnt to love turgid chunks of text in the way that academics do, there’s a danger here of too much information. I was interested to read David Berube’s sceptical comments on a consensus conference held at Madison, Wisconsin earlier this year. My feeling on reading these conclusions is that the participants, presented with such eminently reasonable documents as the Royal Society report, simply agreed with them, as well they might do. I’d hope, though, that the real value of this kind of public deliberative process would come from the new and unexpected insights that people who haven’t been previously been deeply immersed in the debate might come up with.

A visit from Sir Harry Kroto

We’re having a visit today, here at the University of Sheffield, from Sir Harry Kroto. Sir Harry, who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley is a graduate of Sheffield University and is here to open a new multidisciplinary research building which is going to be named after him.

Sir Harry gave a public lecture about nanoscience, which was an impassioned statement of his belief that nanoscience and technology (which he believes to be essentially synonymous with chemistry) offers the only way towards achieving a sustainable way of life for the whole of the world’s population.

At Hay-on-Wye

I’ve just finished my talk on nanotechnology here at the Guardian Hay Festival; I was speaking to a nearly full tent, competing only with the sound of the Welsh rain beating on the canvas. There were plenty of questions and afterwards I signed a dozen or so copies of Soft Machines. I have to admit to being more than usually nervous; the audience here gives the impression of being absolutely the epitome of the stereotypical Guardian reader; liberal, left-leaning (this I infer from the wild applause and cheering from the tent in which Tony Benn was talking), and not, perhaps, naturally uncritical supporters of science and technology. They also seem to have implausibly well-behaved and bookish children. Nonetheless it seemed to go well and the comments afterwards were very appreciative, with one exception.

Hay-on-Wye is an odd sort of place at the best of times; a sleepy small market town on the border of England and Wales which by some quirk has become the centre of the UK’s second hand book trade, to support which there’s grown up an infrastructure of organic wholefood outlets, expensive, yet tasteful and understated, guest houses, and shops selling arts and crafts of all kinds. Some tensions result from this collision of the rural and metropolitan cultures; some of these are conveyed in Iain Sinclair’s novel Landor’s Tower, which like all his work manages to impart an unlikely seedy, dangerous glamour to the world of second-hand books. But none of this takes away from the beauty of the landscape here; it’s where the rich orchards and half-timbered houses of Herefordshire meet the harder hills and moors of Wales, with its scrawny sheep and struggling hill-farms. This liminal quality is reflected in the strange place-names, neither Welsh nor English – “Evenjobb”, “Burfa”, “the Begwns”, and a surprising number of places called “Worlds End”. The area has a deep personal resonance for me, because as a boy it’s the first place that I was let out into on my own for a few days without adult supervision. In 1975 a school-friend and I, both just turned 14, walked and camped from near Shrewsbury to Hay-on-Wye. At the time it felt to us like a bigger adventure than going to the Himalayas. The friend, Mark Miller, later became a mountaineer of some notoriety (there are some good anecdotes about him in Joe Simpson’s memoir “This Game of Ghosts”) before a tragically early death in the 1993 Katmandu air crash.

I’m veering into literature and autobiography, clearly intoxicated by my adventure past the “Artists only” sign into the famous Hay Festival Green Room. The people around me are undoubtedly famous authors and literary figures, but I’m too unworldly to recognise them. Time for me to pick up my payment (a case of champagne) and return to my usual rather less literary surroundings.

The Guardian Hay Festival

The UK’s major literary festival of literature takes place in the charming Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye between 27 April and 5 June. The program of the Guardian Hay Festival 2005 is dominated, as usual, by literary heavyweights like Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Dave Eggers and Jeanette Winterson. There’s room for a little bit of science, though, and I’ll be talking about my book Soft Machines at 10 am on Wednesday 1 June.

Thanks to TNTlog for highlighting this last week.

Radio Nanotechnology

The BBC’s spoken word radio station, Radio 4, is giving nanotechnology full billing at the moment (perhaps they are getting bored with the election). In addition to last night’s Reith Lecture, given by Lord Broers, the consumer program You and Yours covered the subject in some depth this lunchtime (listen to it here).

The piece included a long interview with Ann Dowling, chair of the Royal Society Report, a walkround the Science Museum exhibition – Nanotechnology: small science, big deal, an interview with Erik van der Linden from Wageningen Agricultural University in the Netherlands, talking about nanotechnology in food, mostly in the context of converting plant protein into meat substitutes, and encapsulation of nutriceuticals and flavours. There was, of course, a spokesman from Nanotex telling us all about stain resistant trousers.

What there was no mention at all of was molecular manufacturing. I rather suspect that this will be interpreted in some quarters as a conspiracy of silence.

Politics and the National Nanotechnology Initiative

The view that the nanobusiness and nanoscience establishment has subverted the originally intended purpose of the USA’s National Nanotechnology Initiative has become received wisdom amongst supporters of the Drexlerian vision of MNT. According to this reading of nanotechnology politics,
any element of support for Drexler’s vision for radical nanotechnology has been stripped out of the NNI to make it safe for mundane near-term applications of incremental nanotechnology like stain resistant fabric. This position is succintly expressed in this Editorial in the New Atlantis, which makes the claim that the legislators who supported the NNI did so in the belief that it was the Drexlerian vision that they were endorsing.

A couple of points about this position worry me. Firstly, we should be very clear that there is a very important dividing line in the relationship between science and politics that any country should be very wary of crossing. In a democratic country, it’s absolutely right that the people’s elected representatives should have the final say about what areas of science and technology are prioritised for public spending, and indeed what areas of science are left unpursued. But we need to be very careful to make sure that this political oversight of science doesn’t spill over into ideological statements about the validity of particular scientific positions. If supporters of MNT were to argue that the government should overrule the judgement of the scientific community about what approach to radical nanotechnology is most likely to work on what are essentially ideological grounds, then I’d suggest they recall the tragic and unedifying history of similar interventions in the past. Biology in the Soviet Union was set back for a generation by Lysenko, who, unable to persuade his colleagues of the validity of his theory of genetics, appealed directly to Stalin. Such perversions aren’t restricted to totalitarian states; Edward Teller used his high level political connections to impose his vision of the x-ray laser on the USA’s defense research establishment, in the face of almost universal scepticism from other physicists. The physicists were right, and the program was abandoned, but not before the waste of many billions of dollars.

But there’s a more immediate criticism of the theory that the NNI has been highjacked by nanopants. This is that it’s not right, even from the point of view of supporters of Drexler. The muddle and inconsistency comes across most clearly on the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology’s
blog. While this entry strongly endorses the New Atlantis line, this entry only a few weeks earlier expresses the opinion that the most likely route to radical nanotechnology will come through wet, soft and biomimetic approaches. Of course, I agree with this (though my vision of what radical nanotechnology will look like is very different from that of supporters of MNT); it is the position I take in my book Soft Machines; it is also, of course, an approach recommended by Drexler himself. Looking across at the USA, I see some great and innovative science being done along these lines. Just look at the work of Ned Seeman, Chad Mirkin, Angela Belcher or Carlo Montemagno, to take four examples that come immediately to mind. Who is funding this kind of work? It certainly isn’t the Foresight Institute – no, it’s all those government agencies that make up the much castigated National Nanotechnology Initiative.

Of course, supporters of MNT will say that, although this work may be moving in the direction that they think will lead to MNT, it isn’t been done with that goal explicitly stated. To this, I would simply ask whether it isn’t a tiny bit arrogant of the MNT visionaries to think that they are in a better position to predict the outcome of these lines of inquiry than the people who are actually doing the research.

Whenever science funding is allocated, there is a real tension between the short-term and the long-term, and this is a legitimate bone of contention between politicians and legislators, who want to see immediate results in terms of money and jobs for the people they represent, and scientists and technologists with longer term goals. If MNT supporters were simply to argue that the emphasis of the NNI should be moved away from incremental applications towards longer term, more speculative research, then they’d find a lot of common cause with many nanoscientists. But it doesn’t do anyone any good to confuse these truly difficult issues with elaborate conspiracy theories.

Politics in the UK

Some readers may have noticed that we are in the middle of an election campaign here in the UK. Unsurprisingly, science and technology have barely been mentioned at all by any of the parties, and I don’t suppose many people will be basing their voting decisions on science policy. It’s nonetheless worth commenting on the parties’ plans for science and technology.

I discussed the Labour Party’s plans for science for the next three years here – this foresees significant real-terms increases in science funding. The Conservative Party has promised to “at least match the current administration’s spending on science, innovation and R&D”. However, the Conservative’s spending plans are predicated on finding ��35 billion in “efficiency savings”, of which ��500 million is going to come from reforming the Department of Trade and Industry’s business support programmes. I believe it is under this heading that the ��200 million support for nanotechnology discussed here comes from, so I think the status of these programmes in a Conservative administration would be far from assured. The Liberal Democrats take a simpler view of the DTI – they just plan to abolish it, and move science to the Department for Education.

So, on fundamental science support, there seems to be a remarkable degree of consensus, with no-one seeking to roll back the substantial increases in science spending that the Labour Party has delivered. The arguments really are on the margins, about the role of government in promoting applied and near-market research in collaboration with industry. I have many very serious misgivings about the way in which the DTI has handled its support for micro- and nano- technology. In principle, though, I do think it is essential that the UK government does provide such support to businesses, if only because all other governments around the world (including, indeed perhaps especially, the USA) practise exactly this sort of interventionist policy.

Nobel Laureates Against Nanotechnology

This small but distinguished organisation has gained another two members. The theoretical condensed matter physicist Robert Laughlin, in his new book A Different Universe: reinventing physics from the bottom down, has a rather scathing assessment of nanotechnology, with which Philip Anderson (who is himself a Nobel Laureate and a giant of theoretical physics), reviewing the book in Nature(subscription required), concurs. Unlike Richard Smalley, Laughlin’s criticism is directed at the academic version of nanotechnology, rather than the Drexlerian version, but adherents of the latter shouldn’t feel too smug because Laughlin’s criticism applies with even more force to their vision. He blames the seductive power of reductionist belief for the delusion: “The idea that nanoscale objects ought to be controllable is so compelling it blinds a person to the overwhelming evidence that they cannot be”.

Nanotechnologists aren’t the only people singled out for Laughlin’s scorn. Other targets include quantum computing, string theory (“the tragic consequence of an obsolete belief system”) and most of modern biology (“an endless and unimaginably expensive quagmire of bad experiments”). But underneath all the iconoclasm and attitude (and personally I blame Richard Feynman for making all American theoretical physicists want to come across like rock stars), is a very serious message.

Laughlin’s argument is that reductionism should be superseded as the ruling ideology of science by the idea of emergence. To quote Anderson “The central theme of the book is the triumph of emergence over reductionism: that large objects such as ourselves are the product of principles of organization and of collective behaviour that cannot in any meaningful sense be reduced to the behaviour of our elementary constituents.” The origin of this idea is Anderson himself, in a widely quoted article from 1971 – More is different. In this view, the idea that physics can find a “Theory of Everything” is fundamentally wrong-headed. Chemistry isn’t simply the application of quantum mechanics, and biology is not simply reducible to chemistry; the organisation principles that underlie, say, the laws of genetics, are just as important as the properties of the things being organised.

Anderson’s views on emergence aren’t as widely known as they should be, in a world dominated by popular science books on string theory and “the search for the God particle”. But they have been influential; an intervention by Anderson is credited or blamed by many people for killing off the Superconducting Supercollider project, and he is one of the founding fathers of the field of complexity. Laughlin explicitly acknowledges his debt to Anderson, but he holds to a particularly strong version of emergence; it isn’t just that there are difficulties in practise in deriving higher level laws of organisation from the laws describing the interactions of their parts. Because the organisational principles themselves are more important than the detailed nature of the interactions between the things being organised, the reductionist program is wrong in principle, and there’s no sense in which the laws of quantum electrodynamics are more fundamental than the laws of genetics (in fact, Laughlin argues on the basis of the strong analogies between QED and condensed matter field theory that QED itself is probably emergent). To my (philosophically untrained) eye, this seems to put Laughlin’s position quite close to that of the philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright. There’s some irony in this, because Cartwright’s book The Dappled World was bitterly criticised by Anderson himself.

This takes us a long way from nanoscience and nanotechnology. It’s not that Laughlin believes that the field is unimportant; in fact he describes the place where nanoscale physics and biology meets as being the current frontier of science. But it’s a place that will only be understood in terms of emergent properties. Some of these, like self-assembly, are starting to be understood, but many others are not. But what is clear is that the reductionist approach of trying to impose simplicity where it doesn’t exist in nature simply won’t work.