Social and economic aspects of nanotechnology – Page 14

Scenarios for the future of transport

The UK government established a new horizon-scanning unit in its Office and Science and Technology a few years ago, and this has now issued its first report. This takes a look at likely scenarios for transport infrastructures over the next fifty years, but since transport and communications are so central to our economy these scenarios form a fairly comprehensive look at how new technology might change the way we live. In particular, they cover three big questions about technology and the future:

Where will the energy that currently underwrites our lifestyle in the developed world come from?

How will we exploit the growing amount of information processing and communication power we will have at our disposal?

Will the world carry on its trend to centralisation in manufacturing and energy generation, or will we see a switch to increasingly decentralised modes of production?

The web-site has links to lot of excellent material, including many interesting, specially commissioned background papers, but perhaps the most interesting things are the Project overview (54 page PDF), and the Scenarios (89 page PDF). The latter bring the subject to life with four plausible, but highly contrasting, scenarios for how things might turn out.

The techno-optimist’s scenario is called “Perpetual motion”. Here it’s assumed that technology has managed to overcome the problems of sustainable energy with some combination of the hydrogen economy, nuclear fuels, coal and carbon sequestration. Everything and everyone is plugged in to the information grid, and the major problem the world faces is workplace stress. There’s a green nirvana too: “Urban colonies” imagines a future of sustainable urbanisation, where personal transport is discouraged by heavy taxation. Energy comes from microgrids, there is universal recycling and reuse. People are prosperous, but the economy revolves around fewer goods and more services. Iin short, it’s a vision of the future in which everywhere looks like Copenhagen, rather than Seoul. But, on the principle that the statistically most accurate way of predicting the weather tomorrow is to look out of the window today, what is considered the most likely scenario is called “Good intentions”. This is a world in which hard decisions have been put off until too late. Transport is both highly congested and highly priced; there’s been some progress with biofuels but accelerating climate change is leading to increasingly frequent weather disasters. Both prosperity and personal freedom are compromised.

Techno-optimists think that the accelerating pace of technological advances will determine how the world changes, while green-tinged social liberals believe that the future can be deliberately shaped by human, democratic values. There is a third, much uglier, possibility; that we will be unable to prevail over overwhelming societal strains imposed by external shocks. This is the world of the most pessimistic scenario, “Tribal trading”. Here an early end to the era of cheap energy has stripped the veneer from our globalised world. A decline in oil production has led to spiralling oil prices. Economic depression has ended with the near-complete collapse of world and national financial systems, with resource wars and environmental disasters adding to the gloom. It’s a world of walls and borders and vegetable gardens, in which the 90’s experience of Cuba offers some of the best coping strategies. Some technology survives, and with travel over even modest distances prohibitively difficult and expensive, robust communications are more important than ever. For advice, we’re directed to the poet Gary Snyder:

“What is to be done? Learn to be more self-reliant, reduce your desires, and take care of yourself and your family”.

On Nanohype

David Berube’s new book on nanotechnology, Nanohype, is reviewed in this week’s Nature (subscription required). The review is, in truth, not very favourable, but I’m not going to comment on that until my own copy of Nanohype makes it from the Amazon warehouse across the Atlantic. As is often the case, though, the major message of the review is that this is not the book that the reviewer would have written, which in this case is rather interesting, as the reviewer was Harry Collins, one of the foremost exponents of the discipline of the sociology of science.

Collins’s research method is in-depth studies of scientific communities, in which he attempts to uncover the often tacit shared values that underly the scientific enterprise. As such, he is rather sceptical about the value of written material: “science is an oral culture. Although science’s spokespersons rattle on endlessly about peer review, the vast majority of published papers, peer reviewed or not, are largely ignored by scientists in the field. The problem that would face an alien from another planet who wanted to make a digest of terrestrial science from the literature alone would be about as bad as that facing a lay person who tries to understand it by reading everything on the Internet.”

Here’s why nanotechnology is interesting – as a scientific culture it barely exists yet. In contrast to the fields that Collins has studied – most recently, the search for gravitational waves – the idea of nanotechnology as a field has been imposed from the outside the scientific community, by the forces which I imagine Berube’s book documents, rather than emerging from within it. So the community shared values that Collins’s work aims to uncover are not yet even agreed upon.

For those readers who are sceptical about the very idea of the sociology of science, the BBC is currently broadcasting a pair of very interesting documentaries about how science works, called Under Laboratory Conditions; the first one, broadcast last Wednesday on the BBCs digital service BBC4, rang very true to me (and I say this not just because I made a brief appearance in the program myself).

Writing the history of the nanobot

The nanobot – the tiny submarine gliding through the bloodstream curing all our ills – is one of the most powerful images underlying the public perception of nanotechnology. In the newspapers, it seems compulsory to illustrate any article about any sort of nanotechnology with a fanciful picture of a nanobot and a Fantastic Voyage reference. Yet, to say that nanoscientists are ambivalent about these images is putting it mildly. Amongst the more sober nanobusiness and nanoscience types, the word nanobot is shorthand for everything they despise about the science fiction visions that nanotechnology has attracted. For my own part, I’ve argued that the popular notions of the nanobot are an embodiment of the fallacy that advanced nanotechnology will look like conventional engineering shrunk in size. And even followers of Drexler, in an attempt to head off fears of the grey goo dystopia of out-of-control self-replicating nanobots, have taken to downplaying their importance and arguing that their brand of advanced nanotechnology will take the form of innocent desktop devices looking rather like domestic bread-making machines.

The power of the nanobot image in the history of nanotechnology is emphasized by a recent article by a social scientist from the University of Nottingham, Brigitte Nerlich. This article, From Nautilus to Nanobo(a)ts: The Visual Construction of Nanoscience traces the evolution of the nanobot image from its antecendents in science fiction, going back to Jules Verne, through Fantastic Voyage, right through to those stupid nanobot images that irk scientists so much. Nerlich argues that ” popular culture and imagination do not simply follow and reflect science. Rather, they are a critical part of the process of developing science and technology; they can inspire or, indeed, discourage researchers to turn what is thinkable into new technologies and they can frame the ways in which the ‘public’ reacts to scientific innovations.”

Attempts to write the nanobot out of the history of nanotechnology thus seem doomed, so we had better try and rehabilitate the concept. If we accept that the shrunken submarine image is hopelessly misleading, how can we replace it by something more realistic?

Eat up your buckyballs (for your liver’s sake)

The discovery by Eva Oberdorster that the molecule C60, or buckminster fullerene, caused brain damage in large mouthed bass received huge publicity when it was first reported, (see here for a relatively level-headed account). This work has now become one of the main underpinning texts of the belief that there is something uniquely dangerous about nanomaterials. It’s interesting, though perhaps not surprising, that a recent article in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters, which reaches an exactly opposite conclusion, (abstract, subscription required for full article) has received no publicity at all.

In this work, from Fathi Moussa’s group in the Department of Pharmacy in Université Paris XI, it is shown that not only did C60 not have a toxic effect on the rats and mice it was tested on; it also protected rat’s livers from the toxic effects of carbon tetrachloride, an effect ascribed to C60’s powerful anti-oxidant properties. The paper is not reticent in its criticism of the earlier work; it ascribes the apparent toxic effects previously observed to the fact that the C60 was prepared in an organic solvent, THF, which was not completely removed when a water-suspension of C60 was prepared. In short, it was the toxic effects of THF that were affecting the unfortunate fish, not those of C60. The tone of these comments is suprisingly caustic for a peer reviewed paper, and it finishes with a note of magnificent Gallic sarcasm. Referring to reports that naturally occurring fullerenes (presumably from the soot from forest fires) have been discovered in fossil dinosaur eggs, the authors ask “we feel that it cannot be said that the C60 discovered in dinosaur eggs was the origin of the mass extinction of these animals, or was it?”

I should stress that I’m not advocating that Soft Machines readers should immediately consume a large quantity of C60 and then start abusing solvents, nor should we now assume that fullerenes are entirely safe and without potential environmental problems. But there are a couple of lessons we should draw from this. Firstly, toxicology is not necessarily easy to get right. But perhaps the most important lesson is that learning about science from press releases is very misleading. What appear to be the big breakthroughs at the time get lots of coverage, but the follow-up work, which can modify or even completely contradict the initial big story, barely gets noticed.

The Wild, Wild East

There’s a developing conventional wisdom about the way science and technology in general, and nanotechnology in particular, is developing in Asia. This comes in two parts: firstly, it’s noted that the Asian countries – particularly China – are set to overtake the west in science and technology, and then it’s suggested that what will help these countries gain their new supremacy is the fact that there, technology will be developed without moral scruples, in contrast to the self-inflicted handicaps that Western countries are suffering. These handicaps, conventional wisdom further asserts, take the form, in the United States, of opposition from the religious right to the entire secular, scientific worldview, while in Europe anti-growth, left-wing environmentalists are the major culprits. The idea of a lawless, wild east, where technological stuff just gets done without agonising about social and environmental consequences, is becoming a bit of a bogeyman for western politicians, as nicely pointed out in this recent Demos pamphlet.

Clearly the rapid development of nanotechnology, together with biotechnology and other branches of advanced applied science, in China, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, is a significant and important story that’s likely to profoundly change the shape of the world political economy over the next twenty years. But I can’t entirely buy in to the current mood of panic about this. Firstly, idealistic though I may be, I don’t believe that the development of science and technology is a zero-sum game. The opposite, in fact – the benefits of technological advances can spread from their place of invention very rapidly round the world. Given on the one hand, the very urgent environmental and developmental problems that need to be solved in the world now, and on the other, the entirely legitimate aspirations of the citizens of less developed countries to the lifestyles we enjoy in the west, the rapid development of science and technology in countries like China should be welcomed. Secondly, it just doesn’t seem plausible that science and technology really will develop in these countries without being constrainted by societal values. I know much less than I would like about the cultures, beliefs and values of these different countries, but I’m sure that societal and ethical issues will be hugely important in steering the development of technology there, even though some of those issues may be different from the ones that are important in the west. And just as the west consists of many different countries with societal values that differ from each other in important ways, the idea of a monolithic set of “Asian values” must be at best a gross oversimplification.

An interesting little vignette that illuminates some of these issues is provided by the recent saga about the troubles of the Korean stem cell pioneer Hwang Woo-Suk. Heavily criticised in the west for the ethical lapse of using donated eggs from his own graduate students, he has been strongly defended in his native Korea. At first sight, this seems to exactly support the conventional wisdom – in this view the Koreans have gained a world-leading position in stem-cell research by simply pressing ahead while western countries – particularly, in this case, the USA – have hesitated due to moral and religious qualms. But, as discussed in this very interesting article in the Economist, the reality is probably rather more complex and nuanced.

China not, after all, #2 in nanotechnology – Lux Research

My post on Wednesday about the reported claim that China was now #2 in nanotechnology in the world, as measured by output of nanoscience publications, brought a detailed and useful response by email from Matthew Nordan from Lux Research. He pointed out that the study that the Small Times report was based on aggregated a total of 17 metrics, of which the publications count I was referring to was only one. Taking the overall picture, China was still weak both in nanotechnology activity and in its capacity to use nanotechnology to drive economic growth. The only two measures on which it is currently strong is in the publications count that I was discussing, whose shortcomings Matthew acknowledges, and in total spending. There are some pertinent comments about the difficulty of ranking expenditure measures over on TNTlog. Nonethless, China’s capability is growing fast.

The way this story has been reported is an interesting case study in how commentators look for the story they want to see. “China rising” is a powerful narrative at the moment, and any evidence that can be beaten into a form that supports this narrative will be newsworthy. The four page summary of the complete report, which Matthew Nordan kindly forwarded to me, divides nations into Dominant (USA, Japan, Germany and South Korea) – strong both in basic research and commercialisation, Ivory Tower (UK and France), strong in basic research but weaker in commercialisation, Niche Players (Israel, Singapore and Taiwan), weaker in basic research but strong in commercialisation of selected regions. China falls into the Minor League category, weak on both measures, and so not even in the top nine of nanotech powers. The report does suggest that China is moving strongly forward but there is no suggestion that it will overtake the current leaders. Nonetheless, it’s the China story that Lux’s public relations people chose to highlight, heading their press release “CHINA: MOVING FROM LAGGARD TO POWER PLAYER IN NANOTECHNOLOGY” (PDF). The story was obligingly picked up by Small Times, who headlined their story “CHINA MOVING UP IN NANO WORLD” and picked out the two measures on which China took second place (publications and government spend at purchasing power parity). This allowed Nanodot to headline its story “Claim: China is now #2 in nanotech”, which, as we now see, wasn’t the claim at all.

Keeping the nanotech score

A claim from Lux research (reported in Small Times here) that China is now second only to the USA in its output of academic nanoscience papers is being met with some scepticism over on Nanodot. While there is clearly a real and important story about the huge recent growth in nanoscience capability in China, I’m also a bit sceptical about the central claim of this story, about China’s publication share. Of course, I don’t know about the detailed methodology in the publications study the Lux report cites. But I do know how a study which reached a very similar conclusion, commissioned for the UK’s science funding agency EPSRC, was done. Essentially, a database search was done for papers with “nano” or some compound thereof in the title.

I can do this too. If we look in “Web of Science” at papers published in 2004 and 2005 with “nano” or a compound thereof in title or abstract, we find that from a total of 59,938 papers, 10,546 – 18% – have at least one address from China. This is still behind the USA, with 28%, but is ahead of Japan, at 11% and Germany, at 8%. The UK is futher behind still, at 4%. (actually, the UK shows up only a pitiful total of 27 papers – 2370 are listed under England, with Wales and Scotland adding a further 487. I never realised British science had such separatist tendencies!). Of course, working out the sums this way will give a set of percentages that add to a total of more than 100%, since many papers have coauthors from different countries.

What’s wrong with this is perhaps only clear to scientists who are working in the field. When I think of what I believe to be the most significant papers in nanoscience, most of them simply don’t mention “nano” anywhere in the title. Why should they? Unless they are actually about carbon nanotubes, their title and abstract will generally refer to something much more specific than the rather general and all-encompassing “nano” label. We can get some feel for the fraction of significant and relevant papers that are excluded by this methodology by asking what proportion of papers by leaders in the nanoscience field would actually show up in a search like this. For example, taking a few more or less random US nanoscientists, only 24% of Whitesides’s papers would show up, 50% of James Heath’s, and even the rather radical and hardcore nanoscience of Ned Seeman and Fraser Stoddart still only pass the “nano” test 54% and 31% of the time respectively. Mark Ratner, despite being a prominent “nano” author, similarly would have nearly 70% of his publications slip undetected through the “nano” net.

And here in the UK, are we lagging behind quite so badly? Maybe, but again if we look at the output of some of our most prominent nanoscientists, we find most of their output is missed by this kind of bibliometric analysis. Of Richard Friend’s 35 papers, only 20% show up in this kind of search, while my Sheffield colleague, quantum dot guru Maurice Skolnick, similarly produced 35 papers, of which precisely 1 passed the nano-test.

I’m labouring the point now, and I’m sure the Lux people would say they’ve done their search in a much more sophisticated way. But I’m still convinced that any kind of mechanistic, keyword based search on the scientific literature is likely to lead to a highly distorted result, simply because what counts as “nanoscience” is so ill-defined. What you are seeing is not an accurate measure of nanoscience output, but a reflection of how strong is the fashion for attaching a “nano” label to ones work. This, of course, is somewhat unfair to people who are studying nanotubes, for example, who can hardly avoid putting “nano” in their titles and abstracts, but one’s strongly tempted to view the ratio (nano papers/total papers) as a kind of “nanohype index”. There is clearly genuine growing strength in China’s nanoscience output, and there is probably cause for concern in the UK, but these rather crude measures need to be taken with a substantial pinch of salt.

(And how do I score myself on the nanohype index? 7% on a total of 15 papers, I’m perversely proud to report).

William: on The shifting sands of UK Government technology prioritisation
Douglas Robertson: on The shifting sands of UK Government technology prioritisation
Matt Cliffe: on When did the UK’s productivity slowdown begin?
Zelah: on What the UK should – and should not – do about semiconductors
Richard Jones: on “Science Superpower: the UK’s Global Science Strategy beyond Horizon Europe”