CHICAGO, Aug. 28 (UPI) -- Though science fiction writers have portrayed nanotechnology as something sinister, and some political activists worry the science of making machinery at the atomic level is a threat to the environment or even humanity, the truth is no one really knows what nanotech's social, cultural, and economic implications will be. But efforts are underway to find out -- soon.
The National Science Foundation, the government body that funds basic research in the United States, has begun a $2-million effort in the social sciences to examine nanotechnology's potential societal impact. Private sector groups and public interest lawyers also are eyeing nanotech, hoping to develop concepts that will lead to informed public policies at the local, national, and international levels.
"The public has always wanted to understand the social implications of this technology and take them into account," M. Mitchell Waldrop, a spokesman for the NSF in Arlington, Va., near the nation's capital, told United Press International. "But researchers are just now figuring out the questions they should ask, and the issues that must be dealt with here."
Learning from the controversy over genetic engineering in Europe and in some Third World countries, where concerns about the safety of genetically modified foods have dominated the debate, public policy researchers want to lay the groundwork for a rational, international discussion of these new developments in technology.
"If the public doesn't trust the scientists and the policy makers, industry will get crushed under the weight of the backlash," said Josh Wolfe, managing partner at Lux Capital, a venture capital firm in New York City that specializes in nanotechnology. "And that's precisely where genetically modified foods went horribly wrong," he told UPI. "They didn't engage the public -- they told them to trust them and accept the developments."
That strategy failed, as evidenced by public protests by European farmers over genetically modified foods.
Nanotechnology often is called a transformative technology -- the 21st century's version of the computer chip or the automobile.
The multidisciplinary field -- animated by input from biologists, physicists, and engineers -- is leading to the creation of new technologies in medicine, computing and manufacturing.
Nanotech work is done on the scale of a nanometer, or a billionth of a meter -- about a fifteen-thousandth the diameter of a human hair.
Work has been underway in the field for some time, but efforts really have been accelerating over the past five years, with developments in nanoscale magnets that could lead to faster and smaller computer hard drives, medical devices that can be implanted in the body to deliver nutrients, and nanoscale sensors.
"The first patents are now just starting to be issued in this field," William Prendergast, a patent lawyer and partner in the Chicago law firm of Brinks, Hofer, Gilson & Lione, who also leads his firm's nanotechnology practice group, told UPI.
As the Clinton administration came to a close about three years ago, the federal government started increasing the level of attention it paid to nanotechnology, Waldrop said. A number of government agencies, from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency, started investing research dollars in the field, he explained.
This year's budget request for nanotechnology research -- spread across several departments -- totals about $800 million.
Congress is moving forward with the Nanotechnology Research & Development Act of 2003, a bill that signals the government is taking this nascent field as seriously as it took the human genome project and other big science projects, Waldrop said.
"Major, Fortune 500 companies and small start-ups are also investing heavily in this area," Prendergast said.
The activity has caught the attention of activist organizations -- such as ETC Group of Winnipeg, Ontario, and Greenpeace -- that are beginning to raise environmental and health concerns about nanotechnology.
A communiqué issued by ETC called for government regulation, toxicology studies, and laboratory protocols to be set for nanotechnology research to prevent an "asbestos-like" public heath crisis.
"We are not ready for this latest and greatest industrial revolution," the group's communiqué said.
Leaders in the research field have grown concerned, fearing the field will be tarnished before its products have even been commercialized.
"There is this extreme view that nanotechnology will be unleashed upon the world and that self-replicating nanobots -- half-human, half-machine -- will devour everything," said Nathan Tinker, executive vice president of the Nanobusiness Alliance, a trade group for the emerging nanotech industry in New York City. "This view holds that nanotechnologies will create something like that which was pictured in the movie, 'The Terminator,'" he told UPI. "But that's just not something that is possible in our lifetimes, or the lifetimes of our children's children."
Public interest lawyers, who are in communication with the government over the policy implications of nanotechnologies, say the time is right to start setting the legal framework for how to deal with the inevitable controversies caused by the new developments.
"Control of the technology, ownership of the technology, and monitoring of the technology are three themes that are under discussion," said Sonia E. Miller, a New York City attorney and founder of a new bar association to deal with transformative technologies. "But first we have to decide who has jurisdiction over nanotechnologies," she told UPI. "And we have to decide who decides that they have jurisdiction over the technologies."
As nanotechnologies span several scientific fields, many U.S. regulators could claim jurisdiction over them, including the Federal Trade Commission, the Food and Drug Administration and even the Consumer Products Safety Commission, said Miller.
Then there is the issue of international jurisprudence -- and jurisdiction.
"Small companies are going to struggle to manage their intellectual property portfolio if there are different rules and regulations in different countries as to what can, and cannot, be patented," said Tinker.
Researchers are embracing these controversies now, before rules are imposed by courts on an ad hoc basis, something that could impede the safe development of the technologies.
"Like any powerful, new technology, nanotech also has the potential for unintended consequences, which is precisely why we can't allow the societal implications to be an afterthought," National Science Foundation director Rita Colwell said in a written statement. "The program has to build in a concern for those implications from the start."
The two new grants are being funded by the NSF to study the sociological and ethical implications of nanotechnologies. The funding will go to the University of South Carolina and to the University of California, Los Angeles, and will help accomplish several goals, including the creation of a database of researchers engaged in development of the technology, and the cultivation of a dialog among professionals in the law, journalism, medicine, and the arts and humanities. The idea is to think through other societal implications of the technology.
Their work -- and the work undertaken by others in industry and academia -- could help science avoid the problems that have plagued genetic engineering for years.
"On the nanoscale level, the traditional laws of physics cease to exist," said Prendergast. "Many times, even our clients don't understand what is going on with their inventions -- and these are the leading researchers in America. But we all want to know what it does, why it works, and what it means."
