Category: Social and economic aspects of nanotechnology

Transhumanism and radical nanotechnology

It’s obvious that there’s a close connection between the transhumanist movement and the idea of radical nanotechnology. Transhumanism is a creed which believes that human nature can and should be transcended with the aid of technological change, effectively leading to salvation both for individuals and society. Together with an expectation of the forthcoming singularity, a trust in cryonics (preservation of corpses at very low temperatures to await future revival) and an enthusiasm for radical life extension, the Drexlerian view of nanotechnology forms part of a belief package held by many transhumanists. The two main organisations devoted to promoting the radical view of nanotechnology, the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology and the Foresight Institute, are explicitly listed in a directory of transhumanist organisations from Michael Anissimov, of the Singularity Institute, who has also written a helpful overview of the transhumanist movement in his blog here.

Is this connection any cause for concern? Transhumanism as a movement has a fairly low profile generally, though blogger John Bruce has recently been exploring the movement and some of its supporters from a critical perspective (this link via TNTlog). But a very negative view of this relationship is presented by Joachim Schummer, a German philosopher now working at the University of South Carolina’s centre for nanoScience & Technology Studies: in an article “”Societal and Ethical Implications of Nanotechnology”: Meanings, Interest Groups, and Social Dynamics in the journal Techné.

Schummer, at the outset, insists on the quasi-religious character of transhumanism, characterising its creed as a belief in “futuristic technological change of human nature for the achievement of certain goals, such as freedom from suffering and from bodily and material constraints, immortality, and “super-intelligence.” He summarises its dependence on the Drexler vision of nanotechnology as follows:

“First, they foresee the development of Drexler’s “assemblers” that should manufacture abundant materials and products of any kind to be made available for everybody, so that material needs will disappear. Second, they expect “assemblers” to become programmable tool-making machines that build robots at the nanoscale for various other transhumanist aspirations—a vision that has essentially fuelled the idea of “singularity”. Thus, they thirdly hope for nanorobots that can be injected into the human body to cure diseases and to stop (or reverse) aging, thereby achieving disease-free longevity or even immortality. Fourth on their nanotechnology wish list are nano-robots that can step by step redesign the human body according to their ideas of “posthuman” perfection. Other nano-robots shall, fifth, make “atom-by-atom copies of the brain”, sixth, implement brain-computer-interfaces for “mind uploading”, seventh, build ultra-small and ultra-fast computers for “mindperfection” and “superintelligence”, and, eighth, revive today’s cryonics patients to let them participate in the bright future.”

Because of the central role to be played by nanotechnology in achieving personal and/or societal salvation, Schummer argues that transhumanists have an existential interest in nanotechnology; and are thus likely to much more accepting of the risks that nanotechnology might bring, on the grounds that the rewards are so great. He singles out the writing of Nick Bostrom, Chairman of the World Transhumanist Association, whose views he summarises thus: “In that mixture of radical utilitarianism and apocalyptic admonition, risks are perceived only for humanity as a whole, are either recoverable for humanity or existential for humanity, and only the existential ones really count. The risks of individuals, to their health and lives, are less important because their risks can be outweighed by steps towards transhumanist salvation of humanity.” Schummer comments that it is this “relative disregard for individual human dignity in risk assessments, i.e. the willingness to sacrifice individuals for the sake of global salvation, that makes transhumanism so inhumane.” Not that advanced nanotechnology is without risks; on the contrary, in the wrong hands it has the potential to destroy all intelligent life on earth. But since in the technologically deterministic view of transhumanists the development of nanotechnology is unavoidable, responsible people must rush to develop it first. Thus, “advancing nanotechnology is not only required for Salvation, but also a moral obligation to avoid Armageddon. “

It’s not surprising that transhumanists find it difficult to take an objective view of nanotechnology and the debates that surround it – to them, it is a matter whose importance, quite literally, transcends life and death.

On my nanotechnology bookshelf

Following my recent rather negative review of a recent book on nanotechnology, a commenter asked me for some more positive recommendations about books on nanotechnology that are worth reading. So here’s a list of nanotechnology books old and new with brief comments. The only criterion for inclusion on this list is that I have a copy of the book in question; I know that there are a few obvious gaps. I’ll list them in the order in which they were published:

Engines of Creation, by K. Eric Drexler (1986). The original book which launched the idea of nanotechnology into popular consciousness, and still very much worth reading. Given the controversy that Drexler has attracted in recent years, it’s easy to forget that he’s a great writer, with a very fertile imagination. What Drexler brought to the idea of nanotechnology, which then was dominated, on the one hand by precision mechanical engineering (this is the world that the word nanotechnology, coined by Taniguchi, originally came from), and on the other by the microelectronics industry, was an appreciation of the importance of cell biology as an exemplar of nanoscale machines and devices and of ultra-precise nanoscale chemical operations.

Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation , by K. Eric Drexler (1992). This is Drexler’s technical book, outlining his particular vision of nanotechnology – “the principles of mechanical engineering applied to chemistry” – in detail. Very much in the category of books that are often cited, but seldom read – I have, though, read it, in some detail. The proponents of the Drexler vision are in the habit of dismissing any objection with the words “it’s all been worked out in ‘Nanosystems'”. This is often not actually true; despite the deliberately dry and textbook-like tone, and the many quite complex calculations (which are largely based on science that was certainly sound at the time of writing, though there are a few heroic assumptions that need to be made), many of the central designs are left as outlines, with much detail left to be filled in. My ultimate conclusion is that this approach to nanotechnology will turn out to have been a blind alley, though in the process of thinking through the advantages and disadvantages of the mechanical approach we will have learned a lot about how radical nanotechnology will need to be done.

Molecular Devices and Machines : A Journey into the Nanoworld , by Vincenzo Balzani, Alberto Credi and Margherita Venturi (2003). The most recent addition to my bookshelf, I’ve not finished reading it yet, but it’s good so far. This is a technical (and expensive) book, giving an overview of the approach to radical nanotechnology through supramolecular chemistry. This is perhaps the part of academic nanoscience that is closest to the Drexler vision, in that the explicit goal is to make molecular scale machines and devices, though the methods and philosophy are rather different from the mechanical approach. A must, if you’re fascinated by cis-trans isomerisation in azobenzene and intermolecular motions in rotaxanes (and if you’re not, you probably should be).

Bionanotechnology : Lessons from Nature, by David Goodsell (2004). I’m a great admirer of the work of David Goodsell as a writer and illustrator of modern cell biology, and this is a really good overview of the biology that provides both inspiration and raw materials for nanobiotechnology.

Soft Machines : Nanotechnology and Life, by Richard Jones (2004). Obviously I can’t comment on this, apart from to say that three years on I wouldn’t have written it substantially differently.

Nanotechnology and Homeland Security: New Weapons for New Wars , by Daniel and Mark Ratner (2004). I still resent the money I spent on this cynically titled and empty book.

Nanoscale Science and Technology, eds Rob Kelsall, Ian Hamley and Mark Geoghegan (2005). A textbook at the advanced undergraduate/postgraduate level, giving a very broad overview of modern nanoscience. I’m not really an objective commentator, as I co-wrote two of the chapters (on bionanotechnology and macromolecules at interfaces), but I like the way this book combines the hard (semiconductor nanotechnology and nanomagnetism) and the soft (self-assembly and bionano).

Nanofuture: What’s Next For Nanotechnology , by J. Storrs Hall (2005). Best thought of as an update of Engines of Creation, this is a an attractive and well-written presentation of the Drexler vision of nanotechnology. I entirely disagree with the premise, of course.

Nano-Hype: The Truth Behind the Nanotechnology Buzz, by David Berube (2006). A book, not about the science, but about nanotechnology as a social and political phenomenon. I reviewed in detail here. I’ve been referring to it quite a lot recently, and am increasingly appreciating the dry humour hidden within its rather complete historical chronicle.

The Dance of Molecules : How Nanotechnology is Changing Our Lives , by Ted Sargent (2006). Reviewed by me here, it’s probably fairly clear that I didn’t like it much.

The Nanotech Pioneers : Where Are They Taking Us?, by Steve Edwards (2006). In contrast to the previous one, I did like this book, which I can recommend as a good, insightful and fairly nanohype-free introduction to the area. I’ve written a full review of this, which will appear in “Physics World” next month (and here also, copyright permitting).

Some reflections on UK nanotechnology policy

The think-tank Demos today released a report, Governing at the Nanoscale: People, policies and emerging technologies. I was one of the speakers at the launch event in London. This, more or less, is what I said.

It’s a pleasure to be asked to give my reactions to “Governing at the Nanoscale”, the latest of a very interesting set of pamphlets from Demos about the relationship between science and society. I’m responding as a scientist who participated in the public engagement aspects of the project, so I’d like to make some personal comments about the experience of public engagement from the scientist’s point of view. Then I’ll go on to make some more general comments about the way UK policy in this area has developed.

As you have seen from the film of the project, I had a lively time at the “Nanoscientists meet nanopublics” event held in the autumn. I’m struck by the editing of the film, which makes it clear that engaging with the public doesn’t necessarily mean agreeing with them! But scientists can derive a great deal from this sort of event, which prompt them to develop a richer picture of the relationships between the science they do themselves and the wider field that they work in with society and the economy.

For me, this event wasn’t an isolated one – it was one of some 21 public engagement events of one kind or another that I’ve taken part in in person over the last couple of years. I mention this not just to blow my own trumpet, but to emphasise the time taken up by a serious attempt to become involved in public engagement work. The rewards of this kind of effort are very great, but to be realistic one also needs to recognise the considerable disincentives that the way science is organised in the UK places in the way of this kind of activity.

Institutionally, public engagement brings no reward at all to the scientists who participate in it. University scientists working in physics, chemistry and materials science departments live and work in an atmosphere of insecurity – the financial pressures on these departments is very great and the threat to their future is very real, as we see in the recent machinations over the closure of Sussex’s chemistry department – the former home, of course, of Britain’s most famous Nanotechnology Nobel Laureate, Sir Harry Kroto. In this atmosphere, academic scientists need to focus on two things – directly raising contract and grant money to keep their departments afloat financially, and putting out high impact academic publications, to ensure a high grade in the Research Assessment Exercise, on which the very survival of departments depends. Public engagement is good for the discipline as a whole, but a Head of Department advising a young scientist is likely to urge him or her to concentrate on getting grants and writing papers for the RAE. Recent policy developments – the advent of full economic costing and the possibility of the RAE being replaced by a metrics-driven system – will only exacerbate this problem. If policy makers want scientists to engage with the public, something needs to be done about these systematic structural disincentives.

I’d like to move on to the more general question of the way policy has evolved in this sphere in connection with nanotechnology. To be blunt, the story here is of an opportunity presented to the UK to take a world lead, an opportunity that has been allowed to trickle away.

The Royal Society/ Royal Academy of Engineering report, published in the summer of 2004, was widely welcomed both in the UK and abroad. It made some very definite recommendations; here I’ll concentrate on three issues. On the possibility of the toxicity of some nanoparticles, the report recommended the setting up and funding of a centre for nanotoxicology studies. Similarly, on issues surrounding the more general relationships between nanotechnology and society, the report recommended funding a centre. Finally, the report recommended a well funded and coordinated program of public engagement. I think many of us were profoundly disappointed by the government’s response to this report, published in spring of last year, which simply rejected the first two of these recommendations.

Let me take the nanotoxicity issue first, as this is proving a case study in how to make a relatively small and manageable problem much bigger than necessary. “Is it safe?’ is the first question that the public, journalists or anyone asks about new products and new processes. It’s not a profound problem, but it needs an evidence base to answer. The report published by the Nanotechnology Research Coordination Group last autumn was in many ways a very good document, with a very good overview of the knowledge gaps and the research needed to fill them. The problem was that it simply failed to provide a mechanism to fill those gaps, simply hoping that good proposals would come to the research councils for funding by peer review. This seems to me to be a category error – the science we need to underpin regulation isn’t necessarily good science as defined by peer review, and if the capacity to do the research isn’t there one can’t just expect it to appear spontaneously.

On the broader relationships between nanotechnology and society, the story is similarly depressing. In the presence of so many excellent social scientists, I’ll not rehearse all the arguments for why these kinds of studies are a good idea, but I would like to pick up two important aspects. We’ll come to public engagement in a moment, but one thing my experience so far tells me is that debates about the impact of nanotechnology need to be informed by clear thinking about plausible possible futures, thinking that needs to be underpinned both by accurate science and an understanding of society and economics that goes beyond the naiveity displayed by a lot of futurism. The second point I’d make is that currently government is spending very large sums of money in an attempt to realise economic gains from its science investment. This spending is informed by tacit or explicit models of innovation, but are these models being critically tested? As we see focused and well resourced centres being set up to study these issues in the USA and in the rest of the Europe, in the UK we have a handful of excellent but small-scale projects, but no centre, no ear-marked funding, no coordination.

Public engagement is perhaps the one area where the picture is not so bleak, and in which the UK has taken a lead. A number of significant efforts, some government funded through schemes like Sciencewise, some, like Nanojury UK, initiatives from outside government, have been carried out. The government’s draft public engagement strategy – published last summer – sets out an overall framework, and a body – the Nanotechnology Engagement Group (which I chair) – has been charged with coordinating and disseminating good practise across government departments and agencies. The challenge now is designing institutional structures so that policy making really is informed by all this public engagement activity. In the key spending organisations – the research councils, led by EPSRC, in what used until recently to be the Innovation Directorate of the DTI, and in the MNT program, I don’t yet see those institutional structures in place.

In EPSRC, there are promising developments in the shape of the new committee chaired by Lord Winston set up to advise Council on public engagement issues. But, in the sphere of nanotechnology, the problem is that there isn’t actually a nanotechnology program for insights from public engagement to shape. The strategy of EPSRC with respect to nanotechnology has been, in essence, not to have a strategy. Has this worked? There are real concerns that the UK is not doing well in nanoscience and nanotechnology. A pair of international studies, commissioned by EPSRC, tell a depressing story. Most recently, we’ve had the report “International Perceptions of UK Research in Physics and Astronomy 2005”, which said “One particular area still requiring attention is nanoscience – it has become a very large area of emphasis worldwide, yet the UK lacks coherence and international visibility in the field.” A similar review for chemistry a few years ago told a similar story: “Nanoscience and technology in the UK clearly lags…It is, however, an area that requires seamless integration of electrical engineering, applied physics, chemistry, and mechanical engineering, and access to specialised facilities: it thus represents the type of multicentre, multidiscipline research at which the UK is constitutively weak. “ Recognising this weakness, EPSRC has set up a working party to consider a new strategy, which will report his autumn, but I’m left with the worry that there is a real structural problem emerging here.

Another point of view might be that what’s important here is that we succeed in making money from nanotechnology, and these societal and public engagement issues are just a distraction from this economic imperative. Clearly the government takes the innovation agenda extremely very seriously, but I would argue that it is a very serious mistake to suppose that the innovation agenda can be isolated from these societal issues. The most obvious connection is, of course, that the public that we’re engaging with is the very same public that will be the customers for the nano-enabled products we’re hoping for, and if they don’t buy the products then no-one will make any money. We hear frequent references to the sorry saga of agricultural biotechnology. A less obvious connection is stressed by my colleague Stephen Wood. It is also the public, working in the many economic sectors that will be affected by nanotechnology, all the way from directly science-based industries to all the areas in which the products of nanotechnology might be put into use, who will, by embracing or failing to embrace nano-enabled products and processes in their working practises, determine their economic impact. In any case I’d prefer to put the issue in a positive way – in our system, societal needs and desires are delivered through market mechanisms, so achieving consensus on what society wants from nanotechnology will as a by-product lead to the desired economic gains.

It’s worth taking a look at the history of the UK’s programme for promoting the commercialisation of nanotechnology. Again, this features a report with strong recommendations that were not followed. The 2002 Taylor report advised the immediate establishment of at least two National Nanotechnology Fabrication Centres. The government instead chose to implement a distributed, network, approach – the Micro- and Nano- Technology Initiative. Is this working? It’s probably too early to judge the economic impact directly, but again we can look at the perceptions of those from abroad. In September 2005 The US based consultancy LUX research published “Ranking the Nations: Nanotech’s Shifting Global Leaders.” This ranked the UK 12th out of 14th by measures of “Technology Development Strength”, not just behind Japan, the USA and South Korea, but behind France, Australia and Russia, and leading only India and China. One can argue, of course, about the validity and robustness of these measures, but these perceptions have a way of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies, as inward investment decisions are made on the basis of this kind of reports.

I’ve deliberately widened my discussion beyond public engagement and societal issues, because I think there is a depressing pattern emerging – a pattern of lack of commitment, institutional fragmentation, and a tendency to diffuse and unfocused efforts, which gives rise to the perception from outside the UK of a fundamental lack of seriousness.

One might ask why this matters. My answer isn’t so much that I believe that nanotechnology will soon be a one trillion dollar industry or will revolutionise this or that aspect of society. What’s more important is that nanotechnology is a test case for a new kind of science, fundamentally interdisciplinary, motivated by applications. How do we arrange to do goal-oriented science that delivers societal needs via market mechanisms with the broad support and consent of the population? This to me is the central question that underlies “Governing at the Nanoscale”.

Which nation’s scientific output is rising fastest?

China, you might say, but you’d be wrong, according to a study of world rankings in science published recently by the UK government (latest DTI study into the outputs and outcomes from UK science – 920 kB PDF). This looks at a variety of input and output measures to construct a fairly complete picture of the distribution of scientific activity and impact around the world. Notwithstanding the surprising answer to my trick question (revealed at the end of this post), this report confirms the rapid growth of China as scientific power, the lessening of the formerly unchallenged dominance of the USA, and (from a parochial perspective) the rather strong performance of the UK, which spends less on research and has fewer researchers than its competitors, but nonetheless in comparison produces proportionately more science with a greater impact.

It’s in spending on science research that the rise of China is most obvious – in real terms (adjusted for purchasing power parity) China’s research spend has increased four-fold in the last decade; it now exceeds that of all other individual countries except USA and Japan, and has reached half the European Union total. In terms of output of scientific publications, China now has a 5% world share, up by a factor of three in the last decade, and now greater than France. Again, in terms of individual nations the USA still leads by this output measure, with almost exactly one third of world output, but the European Union nations taken together have now outstripped the USA, with 37.9% of publications. The UK, at just less than 9%, is the second placed individual nation, having recently overtaken Japan. If we took the Asia-Pacific group of China, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore together they would account for 10% of world output.

What about quality and impact? Here the USA still has a clear lead; taking as a measure of world impact the share of the most highly cited papers (taken as the top 1% in each discipline) puts the USA in the lead with 61%, while the UK outperforms its volume share with 13% of highly cited papers. China still underperforms on this measure but the gap is closing, and is likely to close further as citation counts are a lagging indicator – it takes some years for spending on science to translate, first into publication outputs, and only later into citations of those papers by other workers.

The country whose output of scientific publications has increased the most over the last decade is Iran, whose output has increased by a factor of ten, albeit from a low base (China’s increased by a factor of three, the second fastest rate of growth). It will be interesting to see, in the light of recent political developments, whether Iran’s good performance will continue.

The road to nanomedicine may not always be quick or easy

Of the six volunteers who became seriously ill during a drug trial last week, four, mercifully, seem to be beginning to recover, while two are still critical, according to the most recent BBC news story. It’s still too early to be sure what went so tragically wrong; there are informative articles, with some informed comment, on the websites both of New Scientist and Nature. What we should learn from this is that even as medicine gets more sophisticated and molecularly specific, many things can go wrong in the introduction of new therapies. The length of time it takes new treatments to get regulatory approval can be frustratingly, agonisingly long, but we need to be very careful about the calls we sometimes hear to speed these processes up. The delays are not just gratuitous red tape.

The drug behind this news story was developed by a small, German company, TeGenero immunotherapeutics. It’s a monoclonal antibody, code-named TGN1412; a protein molecule which specifically binds to a receptor molecule on T-cells, a type of white blood cell which is central to the body’s immune response. The binding site – code-named CD28 – is a glyco-protein – a combination of a protein with a carbohydrate segment – which provides the signal to activate the T-cells. What’s special about TGN1412 is that the action of this drug alone is sufficient to activate the T-cells; normally simultaneous binding to two different receptors is required. It’s as if TGN1412 overrides the safety catch, allowing the T-cells to be activated by a single trigger. It’s these activated T-cells that then carry out the therapeutic purpose, killing cancer cells, for example.

Few people have connected these events with bionanotechnology (an exception is the science journalist Niels Boeing in this piece on the German Technology Review blog). There are now a number of monoclonal antibody based drugs in clinical use, and they are not normally considered to be the product of nanomedicine. But they do illustrate some of the strategies that underlie developments in nanomedicine – they are exquisitely targeted to particular cells, they exploit the chemical communication strategies that cells use, and they increasingly co-opt biology’s own mechanisms for clinical purposes. Biology is so complex that it’s always going to spring surprises, and the worry must be that as our interventions in complex biological systems become more targeted, so the potential for unpleasant surprises may increase. Whenever one hears blithe assurances that nanotechnology will soon cure cancer or arrest ageing if only those bureaucratic regulators would allow it, one needs to think of those two men struggling for their lives in a North London hospital. There may be good reasons why the pace of innovation in medicine can sometimes be slow.

Forthcoming nano events in Sheffield

A couple of forthcoming events might interest nano-enthusiasts at a loose end in South Yorkshire in the next few weeks. Next Monday at 7pm, there’s a public lecture as part of National Science Week in the Crucible Theatre, called “A robot in the blood”. In it, my colleagues Tony Ryan and Noel Sharkey, will discuss what a real medical nanobot might look like. Both are accomplished public performers – Tony Ryan is a chemist (with whom I collaborate extensively) who gave the Royal Institution Christmas lectures a couple of years ago, and Noel Sharkey is an engineer and roboticist who regularly appears in the TV program “Robot Wars”.

Looking further ahead, on Monday April 3rd there is a one day meeting about “Nanotechnology in Society: The wider issues”. This will involve talks from commentators on nanotechnology from different view points, followed by a debate. Speakers include Olaf Bayer, from the campaigning group Corporate Watch, Jack Stilgoe, from the public policy thinktank Demos, Stephen Wood, co-author (with me and Alison Geldart) of the Economic and Social Reseach Council report “The Social and Economic Challenges of Nanotechnology”, and Rob Doubleday, a social scientist working in the Cambridge Nanoscience Centre. The day is primarily intended for the students of our Masters course in Nanoscale Science and Technology, but anyone interested is welcome to attend; please register in advance as described here.

How much should we worry about bionanotechnology?

We should be very worried indeed about bionanotechnology, according to Alan Goldstein, a biomaterials scientist from Alfred University, who has written a long article called I Nanobot on this theme in the online magazine Salon.com. According to this article, we are stumbling into creating a new form of life, which is, naturally, out of our control. “And Prometheus has returned. His new screen name is nanobiotechnology.” I think that some very serious ethical issues will be raised by bionanotechnology and synthetic biology as they develop. But this article is not a good start to the discussion; when you cut through Goldstein’s overwrought and overheated writing, quite a lot of what he says is just wrong.

Goldstein makes a few interesting and worthwhile points. Life isn’t just about information, you have to have metabolism too. A virus isn’t truly alive, because it consists only of information – it has to borrow a metabolism from the host it parasitises to reproduce. And our familiarity with one form of life – our form, based on DNA for information storage, proteins for metabolic function, and RNA to intercede between information and metabolism – means that we’re too unimaginative about conceiving entirely alien types of life. But the examples he gives of potentially novel, man-made forms of life reveal some very deep misconceptions about how life itself, at its most abstract, works.

I don’t think Goldstein really understands the distinction between equilibrium self-assembly, by which lipid molecules form vesicles, for example, and the fundamentally out-of-equilibrium character of the self-organisation characteristic of living things. I am literally not the same person I was when I was twenty; living organisms are constantly turning over the molecules they are made from; the patterns persist, but the molecules that make up the pattern are constantly changing. So his notion that if we make an anti-cancer drug delivery device with an antibody that targets a certain molecule on a cell wall, then that device will stay stuck there through the lifetime of the organism, and if it finds its way to a germ cell it will be passed down from generation to generation like a retrovirus, is completely implausible. The molecule that it’s stuck to will soon be turned over, the device itself will be similarly transient. It’s because the device lacks a way to store the information that would be needed to continually regenerate itself that it can’t be considered in any sensible way living.

If rogue, powered vesicles lodging in our sperm and egg cells aren’t scary enough, Goldstein next invokes the possibility of the meddling with the spark of life itself – electricity. But the moment we close that nano-switch and allow electron current to flow between living and nonliving matter, we open the nano-door to new forms of living chemistry — shattering the “carbon barrier.” This is, without doubt, the most momentous scientific development since the invention of nuclear weapons.” This sounds serious, but it seems to be founded on a misconception of how biology uses electricity. Our cells burn sugar, Goldstein says, which “yields high-energy electrons that are the anima of the living state. “ Again, this is highly misleading. The energy currency of biology isn’t electricity, it’s chemistry – specifically it’s the energy containing molecule ATP. And when electrical signals are transmitted, through our nerves, or to make our heart work, it isn’t electrons that are moving, it’s ions. Goldstein makes a big deal out of the idea of a Biomolecule-to-Material interface between a nanofabricated pacemaker and the biological pacemaker cells of the heart. “A nanofabricated pacemaker with a true BTM interface will feed electrons from an implanted nanoscale device directly into electron-conducting biomolecules that are naturally embedded in the membrane of the pacemaker cells. There will be no noise across this type of interface. Electrons will only flow if the living and nonliving materials are hard-wired together. In this sense, the system can be said to have functional self-awareness: Each side of the BTM interface has an operational knowledge of the other.” This sounds like a profound and disturbing blurring of the line between the artificial and the biological. The only trouble is, it’s based on a simple error. Pacemaker cells don’t have electron-conducting biomolecules embedded in their membranes; the membrane potentials are set up and relaxed by the flow of ions through ion channels. There can be no direct interface of the kind that Goldstein describes. Of course, we can and do make artificial interfaces between organisms and artefacts – the artificial pacemakers that Goldstein mentions are one example, and cochlear implants are another. The increasing use of this kind of interface between artefacts and human beings does already raise ethical and philosophical issues, but discussion of these isn’t helped by this kind of mysticism built on misconception.

In an attempt to find an abstract definition of life, Goldstein revives a hoary old error about the relationship between the second law of thermodynamics and life: “The second law of thermodynamics tells us that all natural systems move spontaneously toward maximum entropy. By literally assembling itself from thin air, biological life appears to be the lone exception to this law. “ As I spent several lectures explaining to my first year physics students last semester, what the second law of thermodynamics says is that isolated systems tend to maximum entropy. Systems that can exchange energy with their surroundings are bound only by the weaker constraint that as they change, the total entropy of the universe must not decrease. If a lake freezes, the entropy of the water decreases, but as the ice forms it expels heat which raises the entropy of its surroundings by at least as much as its own entropy decreases. Biology is no different, trading local decreases of entropy for global increases. Goldstein does at least concede this point, noting that “geodes are not alive”, but he then goes on to say that “nanomachines could even be designed to use self-assembly to replicate”. This statement, at least, is half-true; self-assembly is one of the most important design principles used by biology and it’s increasingly being exploited in nanotechnology too. But self-assembly is not, in itself, biology – it’s a tool used by biology. A system that is organised purely by equilibrium self-assembly is moving towards thermodynamic equilibrium, and things that are at equilibrium are dead.

The problem at the heart of this article is that in insisting that life is not about DNA, but metabolism, Goldstein has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Life isn’t just about information, but it needs information in order to be able to replicate, and most centrally, it needs some way of storing information in order to evolve. It’s true that that information could be carried in other vehicles than DNA, and it need not necessarily be encoded by a sequence of monomers in a macromolecule. I believe that it might in principle be possible in the future to build an artificial system that does fulfill some general definition of life. I agree that this would constitute a dramatic scientific development that would have far-reaching implications that should be discussed well in advance. But I don’t think it’s doing anyone a service to overstate the significance of the developments in nanobiotechnology that we are seeing at the moment, and I think that scientists commenting on these issues do have some obligation to maintain some standards of scientific accuracy.

Taking the high road to large scale solar power

In principle there’s more than enough sunlight falling on the earth to meet all our energy needs in a sustainable way, but the prospects for large scale solar energy are dimmed by a dilemma. We have very efficient solar cells made from conventional semiconductors, but they are too expensive and difficult to manufacture in very large areas to make a big dent in our energy needs. On the other hand, there are prospects for unconventional solar cells – Graetzel cells or polymer photovoltaics – which can perhaps be made cheaply in large areas, but whose efficiencies and lifetimes are too low. In an article in this month’s Nature Materials (abstract, subscription required for full article, see also this press release), Imperial College’s Keith Barnham suggests a way out of the dilemma.

The efficiencies of the best solar cells available today exceed 30%, and there is every reason to suppose that this figure can be substantially increased with more research. These solar cells are based, not on crystalline silicon, like standard solar cell modules, but on carefully nanostructured compound semiconductors like gallium arsenide (III-V semiconductors, in the jargon). By building up complex layered structures it is possible efficiently to harvest the energy of light of all wavelengths. The problem is that these solar cells are expensive to make, relying on sophisticated techniques for building up different semiconductor layers, like molecular beam epitaxy, and currently are generally only used for applications where cost doesn’t matter, such as on satellites. Barnham argues that the cost disadvantage can be overcome by combining these efficient solar cells with low-cost systems for concentrating sunlight – in his words “our answer to this particular problem is ‘Smart Windows’, which use small, transparent plastic lenses that track the sun and act as effective blinds for the direct sunlight, when combined with innovative light collectors and small 3rd-generation cells,” and he adds “Even in London a system like this would enable a typical office behind a south-facing wall to be electrically self-sufficient.”

Even with conventional technologies, Barnham calculates that if all roofs and south-facing walls were covered in solar cells this would represent three times the total generating capacity of the UK’s current nuclear program – that is, 36 GW. This represents a really substantial dent in the energy needs of the UK, and if we believe Barnham’s calculation that his system would deliver about three times as much energy as conventional solar cells, this represents pretty much a complete solution to our energy problems. What is absent from the article, though, is an estimate of the total production capacity that’s likely to be achievable, merely observing that the UK semiconductor industry has substantial spare capacity after the telecoms downturn. This is the missing calculation that needs to be done before we can accept Barnham’s optimism.

Critical Design

I spent an interesting afternoon last Tuesday in the Royal College of Art spending some time with the students on the Interaction Design course, who are just beginning a project on nanotechnology. This department began life focusing on Computer Related Design, applying the lessons of fine art and graphic design to human centred design for computer interfaces, but it’s recently broadened its scope to a wider consideration of the way people and societies interact with technology. It’s in this context that the students are being asked to visualise possible nanotechnology-based futures.

My host for the visit was the Head of Department, Tony Dunne, the author of (among other works) Hertzian tales and Design Noir. He uses the space between industrial design, conceptual art and social theory to question the relationship between technology and society; on his appointment to the RCA he wrote “Interaction Design can be a test space where designers engage with different technnologies (not just electronics) before they enter the market place, exploring their possible impact on everyday life through design proposals – from a variety of perspectives: commercial, aesthetic, functional, critical, even ethical. I believe we need to educate designers to a higher level than we presently do, if they are to have a significant and meaningful role to play in the 21st Century and not just sit at the margins producing pleasant distractions”

To see why this approach to design might be useful for nanotechnology, take a look at the Nanofactory animation made by John Burch and Eric Drexler to illustrate their vision of the future of nanotechnology. Making no judgements for the moment about its technical feasibility, its worth looking at the symbolism of this vision. What’s striking about it is how amazingly conservative it is. The nano-fabricator itself looks like an upmarket bread-making machine, while the final product is a palm-top computer that could in design terms have come from your local PC World. It’s worth contrasting this vision with the much more radical vision of manufacturing outlined in Drexler’s original book Engines of Creation, which imagined a rocket motor growing, as if from a seed, in a huge tank of milky fluid. I’m sure this retreat to a more conservative, and less challenging, vision, was deliberate, and part of the attempt to defuse the”grey goo” controversy. If we are going to be prepared for what technological change brings us, we are going to need some more challenging visions of future artefacts, and I look forward to seeing the radical concepts that the design students come up with.

More about Nanohype

Having spent 9 hours in aeroplanes yesterday (not to mention another 6 hours hanging about in a snowy Philadelphia airport waiting for a delayed connection) I have at least had a chance to catch up with some reading. This included two nano- books, one of which was David Berube‘s “Nanohype“. The other (which exemplifies the phenomenon of Berube’s title) was “The Dance of Molecules: how nanotechnology is changing our lives“, by Ted Sargent. I’m reviewing Sargent’s book for Nature, so I’ll save my views on it for later.

“Nanohype” isn’t exactly the usual airport book, though. It’s a rather dense, and extremely closely referenced, account of the way nanotechnology moved from being a staple of futurists and science fiction writers to being the new new thing for technophilic politicians and businessmen, and a new object of opposition for environmentalists and anti-globalisers. For those of us fascinated by the minutiae of how the National Nanotechnology Initiative got going, and of the ways the Nanobusiness Alliance influenced public policy in the USA, it’s going to be the essential source.

The book’s title makes Berube’s basic position pretty clear. Almost everyone involved has some ulterior motive for overstating how revolutionary nanotechnology is going to be, how much money it’s going to make, or the scale of the apocalypse it is going to lead to. Scientists need grants, companies need venture capital, campaigning organisations need publicity and the donations that follow. Not everyone is a huckster, but those that remain idealists end up so divorced from reality that they end up attracting Berube’s (no doubt unwelcome) sympathy. Sometimes the search for low motives leads from bracing cynicism to the brink of absurdity, such as his suggestion that anti-globalisation activist Zak Goldsmith’s opposition to genetic modification of food derives from his wife’s business interests in organic food. This seems a little unlikely, given Goldsmith’s reported £300 million inherited fortune. But Berube’s refusal to take things at face value is a refreshing starting point.

The book has a competent and fairly complete overview of those commercial applications ascribed to nanotechnology, but one thing this book is not about is science. I think this is a pity – there’s an interesting story to be told both about the ascendance of the nanotechnology label amongst academic scientists, and of the resistance, suspicion and cynicism that this has bred in some quarters. But this will have to wait for another chronicler; curiously even giants of academic nanoscience, like Rick Smalley and George Whitesides, appear here as antagonists for the Drexler vision rather than for their own considerable achievements.

Of course, this is a book about politics, not science. It’s about the high-level politics around science funding, the politics of the financial markets, the politics of the campaigning organisation. But despite this political theme, it’s curiously light on ideologies. When we are talking about the societal and ethical implications of nanotechnology, we’re talking about competing visions of the future, competing ideologies. It is striking that many of the protagonists in the nanotechnology debates are driven by very strongly held, and sometimes far from mainstream, creeds. There’s the millenarianism of the transhumanists, the characteristically American libertarianism exemplified by blogger and nano-enthusiast Glenn Reynolds, and on the opposition side the strange blend of radical anti-capitalism, green politics and reactionary conservatism that underlies the world-view of Zak Goldsmith (particularly interesting in the UK now that a newly resurgent conservative opposition party has charged Goldsmith with reviewing its environmental policies). I would like to see a much closer analysis of the deeper reasons why nanotechnology seems to be emerging as a focus of these more profound arguments, but perhaps it’s still too early for this.