Nanotechnology

Risk, Ethics and Law

Geoffrey Hunt, Michael Mehta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136560705
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Insurance
• Index: Business

Nanotechnology - technology at the molecular level - is held out by many as the Holy Grail for creating a trillion dollar economy and solving problems from curing cancer to reprocessing waste into products and building superfast computers. Yet, as with GMOs, many view nanotech as a high risk genie in a bottle that once uncorked has the potential to cause unpredictable, perhaps irreversible, environmental and public health disasters. With the race to bring products to market, there is pressing need to take stock of the situation and to have a full public debate about this new technological frontier. Including contributions by renowned figures such as Roland Clift, K. Eric Drexler and Arpad Pusztai, this is the first global overview of the state of nanotech and society in Europe, the USA, Japan and Canada, examining the ethics, the environmental and public health risks, and the governance and regulation of this most promising, and potentially most dangerous, of all technologies.

1
Introduction:

The Challenge of Nanotechnologies

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Geoffrey Hunt and Michael D. Mehta

Nanotechnologies are making the leap from science fiction to science reality. The overwhelming majority of people have not yet noticed this transition, but the technology of the vanishingly small will be expansively influential in the next couple of decades. For it is not just a new range of technologies but a new social force: a driver of techno-socio-cultural change. Like any other family of radical technologies ‘nanotechnology’ is not just a set of techniques that have appeared independently of society and about which we can now make application-based decisions. It is emerging within an existing nexus of decisions, relationships and values. It is not as though it is now a new subject of completely free choice for the human race: it is emerging within a network of relationships and processes that manifest the choices we have already made over history and are currently living with, for better or worse. The family of nanoscale technologies we call ‘nanotechnology’, like several other critical issues of our time, stands at a juncture between choices for human survival and betterment, and clinging to our global inheritance – not just material inheritance but a largely outdated intellectual and attitudinal inheritance. Which way, nanotechnology?

History

The concept of a nanoscale technology begins with the boldly speculative 1959 article ‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom’ by Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicist Richard Feynman (Feynman, 1959). In it he said he was not afraid to consider the question whether ‘ultimately – in the great future – we can arrange the atoms the way we want; the very atoms, all the way down!’. The word ‘nanotechnology’ was actually first coined by Japanese scientist Taniguchi Nori in 1974, but in the much narrower context of ultrafine machining (see Chapter 6). A futuristic envisioning of the Feynman hypothesis as a socially transforming technology had to await Eric Drexler’s 1986 book Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (Drexler, 1986). In a 1990 ‘Afterword’ he re-states his vision: ‘we are moving towards assemblers, toward an era of molecular manufacturing giving thorough and inexpensive control of the structure of matter’ (Drexler, 1990, p240). His central idea, of using nanoscale mechanisms of assembling molecules to manufacture any substances useful to humans, was technically elaborated in his 1995 work entitled Nanosystems (Drexler, 1992). Meanwhile the instruments and techniques of nanotechnology have brought the vision closer. The atomic force microscope, the scanning tunnelling microscope, magnetic force microscopy, advanced spectroscopy and electrochemistry, nanoscale lithography, molecular self-assembly techniques and others are being perfected and new ones are proliferating.¹

In Chapter 3 of this book, Drexler complains that whereas ‘nanotechnology’, from his starting point, had meant nanomachines of some sort that would be able to build desired entities atom-by-atom (molecular manufacture), it has now shifted to mean any technology involving nanoscale processes and products, and this has ‘obscured the Feynman vision’. He emphasizes that the criticism that nanoreplicators are impossible misses the mark, for molecular manufacture requires no such thing. He explains that it is chemical selfassembly that is the fundamental manufacturing process. ‘It is time for the nanotechnology community to reclaim the Feynman vision in its grand and unsettling entirety’, he declares. Even on, or especially on, the basis of this core concept many social and ethical issues arise. Some of the most important are examined by the Centre for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN).²

Nanotechnology, then, can be more broadly viewed as the contemporary result of a natural ‘downsizing’ progression in nearly all the sciences and their techniques, whether chemistry, materials science, physics, biology, industrial processes, pharmacology, genetic engineering, electronic engineering, neuropsychology and so on. ‘Nanotechnologies’, in the plural, is a more helpful label. There is an inclination, in universities for example, to re-brand almost everything as ‘nanotechnology’ to attract funding and prestige. Of course, if this thing called ‘nanotechnology’ takes on a negative image in the mind of the public, we may see a rapid re-re-branding, with the ‘nano’ being dropped again. This will not alter the fact that a radical change is in fact running through advanced technologies, even if mere size (the nanoscale) is not always sufficient to capture what this change really amounts to. In Chapter 5, Hunt urges that a complex systems approach is necessary for a better understanding of developments in nanotechnoscience.

In this book we do not focus on molecular manufacture, but take a broad view of technologies working at the nanoscale. In fact, quite a lot of emphasis here is on nanoparticles in materials, and in the short term this seems an appropriate focus, partly because of issues of safety. We think that our general approach reflects the current state of thinking around nanotechnological developments.

The nanoscale

Taking a lead from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the defining features of nanotechnological scale relate to structures, devices and systems that have novel properties and functions because of their size, with a length of scale of approximately 1–100 nanometre (nm) range, in at least one dimension. Among other things, the USPTO, states: ‘Nanotechnology research and development includes manipulation, processing, and fabrication under control of the nanoscale structures and their integration into larger material components, systems and architectures. Within these larger-scale assemblies, the control and construction of their structures and components remains at the nanometre scale.’³

One nanometre is one billionth of a metre, and to give this some reality it may help to think, roughly, of the scale of viruses (see the Appendix for examples). One billionth of a metre is approximately ten hydrogen atoms side by side, or about one thousandth of the length of a typical bacterium. Since a single human hair is around 80,000nm in width, objects measured in a few hundred nanometres are invisible to the human eye.⁴ At this scale nanotechnology is operating at the border between classical and quantum physics. As explained in this book, nanoscale particles and other entities often have quite novel, and even unexpected, properties compared with properties of the corresponding bulk substances. It is this novelty – and the uncertainties that go with it – that is both the source of excitement and benefits and of concern and risks. Nanotechnology is such that we cannot even be sure, taken a longer view, that the benefits and risks are like anything we have previously known. New concepts (see the Glossary in the Appendix) and revised standards of hazard and risk assessment seem to be inevitable. General areas of application are as follows:

• manufacturing and industrial processes (catalysts, filters, and so on);

• transport, aeronautical and space engineering;

• biomedicine, pharmaceuticals, targeted drug delivery;

• imaging, sensors, monitoring;

• environmental management;

• food technology, additives, packaging;

• materials, surfaces, textiles, fabrics;

• sports and entertainment technology;

• cosmetics, fragrances, toiletries;

• Information and Communications Technology (ICT);

• intelligence, surveillance and defence.

Examples of specific products containing engineered nanoparticles (such as carbon nanotubes) that are already on the consumer market are: textiles, sportswear, golf balls, tennis rackets, plastic mouldings in vehicles and scratch resistant paint, car tyres, sunscreen and certain electronic consumer goods. Many other products, including nano-catalysts and nano-filters, are available to manufacturers.

Nanotechnology in society

Anyone coming to nanotechnology for the first time may experience mixed feelings: perhaps excitement tinged with anxiety. Kulinowski warns in Chapter 2 that Wow! (wonderful) could easily turn to Yuck! (horrible) in the public mind, depending on several factors not necessarily under the control of scientists, technologists, researchers, corporations and government departments and agencies. ‘Nanotechnology’ as a conception will be nurtured within pre-existing popular mindsets; and the media and popular art forms (films, novels and so on) will have an impact on those mindsets and should not be underestimated. Nanotechnology is as much a public issue as it is an expert issue, and as much a social science subject as a natural science subject. Kulinowski points out that, despite this latent instability in perception, there remains a significant disparity between the research effort that is going into applications and the scant attention given to the whole range of social implications of nanotechnology. Here we could include public understanding, media reception, cultural and religious issues, ethical and legal dimensions, the globalizing context, governance and accountability, disruptive impact on other technologies and on economies, and political and military implications.

Of course, it is not just a case of either a Wow! or a Yuck! response, but one of choices and tensions between human welfare benefits and hazards and risks to human health and the environment. The most important questions about nanotechnologies may not be posed, or not posed sufficiently quickly, systematically and deeply, if it is left to the powerful forces of commerce and competition. In the context of the latter the benefits may be stressed and the questions skewed towards issues of sufficiency of investment, profitability, receptivity of markets, intellectual property, speed of innovation and application (Mehta, 2002), the necessary economic infrastructures, funding of research and development, commercial confidentiality and the like. These are all important questions, but they belong to a discourse that may overlap with, but is not the same as, the human welfare discourse. This book makes forays into both discourses, paying more attention to the latter to help achieve an overall balance, and emerges with concerns as well as hopes.

Regional economic forces

In Part Two it is shown that almost every region of the world that has sufficient material and financial resources is investing in nanotechnology: in research and development, in applications, in conferencing, advertising and public relations, in new infrastructure, institutions and networks, in commercialization, and in educational initiatives. For the time being, the poorer regions, such as Africa and parts of Asia and Latin America, can only stand on the sidelines.

Japan was, and still is, a principal conceptual originator of nanotechnology, especially in materials and electronics, and investments are significant. As Matsuda, Hunt and Obayashi point out in Chapter 6, innovations are moving ahead quickly both in the laboratories of corporations and in those of wellresourced government bodies such as the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). The historically strategic position of nanotechnology in Japan is still not clear. The country is only now recognizing the importance of sustainability and corporate responsibility and, albeit rather more slowly than Europe, implementing the necessary changes. The precautionary principle (a ‘better safe than sorry’ approach; see ) is still regarded with suspicion for the most part, but significant actors and agencies are waking up to the potential of nanotechnology in new market demands for the innovative tools and processes needed for sustainable production. Tense regional geopolitics (especially its future relations with China), the slow pace of internal economic reforms, and a political divide between nationalists and ‘pacifists’, will also shape the role of nanotechnology in Japan.

There is no doubt that the US is leading nanotechnology as a commercial enterprise, in terms of investments, patents, research and military applications. Like Japan, and unlike Europe, the American research and business establishment can count, for the most part, on popular support for science and technology. In Chapter 7 Mills explains the enthusiastic coordinated effort being made through directed investments and new institutional means. Research into the social implications is not being neglected, but as Mills asks, since such research is mainly federally funded and carried out by the nanotechnology community itself, ‘who will guard the guardians?’ Non-governmental organization (NGO) awareness of nanotechnology in Japan may still be at a low level, but this is not so in the US. In the latter, NGOs were invited, but refused to join a centre funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to examine the impacts of nanotechnology on society. In Chapter 11 four experts with the American NGO Environmental Defense examine nanotechnology and argue that on this occasion we have an opportunity to get it right the first time, but new approaches and cooperation are urgently required.

In the current climate, the precautionary principle – which admittedly has some conceptual and implementation difficulties – is viewed with even more suspicion in the US than it is in Japan. A nodal point of controversy for nanotechnology is already growing around a precautionary-based reform of the chemicals regulatory regime, with the European Union (EU) taking a lead which is not very welcome elsewhere (Chapter 8). Mills suggests that ‘Europe and the US are at very different stages in the process of moving from the era of risk-taking … to an era of risk-prevention’. It seems that the tensions over nanotechnology between business and some NGOs, and between different approaches to regulation, can only become deeper in the near future. Certainly in the 25 countries of the EU there appears to be what Hunt calls a ‘dual tension’ (Chapter 8). These are the opposing pressures often created (but not necessarily) by a drive for increased global competitiveness at the same time as moves for sustainable production and consumption, and between the diversity and participatory democracy cherished by many Europeans and the drive towards ‘integration’ on all levels. In some ways the place of nanotechnologies in these European dilemmas is a microcosm of its place in the political economy of the world at large.

Other parts of the world have a stake in nanotechnological development, including China, Korea, some non-EU European nations, Taiwan, Australia, India and, importantly, Canada. In Chapter 9 Goldenberg points out something that may be distinctive about the Canadian approach which the rest of the world should heed. It is ‘inextricably linked to social p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Boxes
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: The Challenge of Nanotechnologies
• PART 1. Introducing Nanotechnology
• PART 2. Regional Developments
• PART 3. Benefits and Risks
• PART 4. Ethics and Public Understanding
• PART 5. Law and Regulation
• PART 6. Conclusion
• Appendix. Measurement Scales and Glossary
• Index