National Science Foundation Ramps Up Studies of Nanotechnology's
Social Implications
The Chronicle
for Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/10/2005101005n.htm
By Jeffrey Brainard
The National
Science Foundation awarded grants last week to finance a network of
academic researchers who will study the social implications of
nanotechnology, like environmental risks and threats to privacy. The
awards represent a significant increase in federal funds for an area
that some argue has been under-studied.
The two
largest grants will go to Arizona State University at Tempe and the
University of California at Santa Barbara. They will get
$6.2-million and $5-million, respectively, over five years. Smaller
awards went to the University of South Carolina and Harvard
University to expand projects that the NSF had already started
supporting.
The effort
is a smaller version of a group of social-science studies that were
financed as part of the Human Genome Project, the effort to map all
human genes that was completed in 2003. Those studies received a
guaranteed 5 percent of the funds for the genome project.
The young
science of nanotechnology aims to create extremely small materials
and devices with novel properties by manipulating matter at the
atomic scale, and the technology's potential applications, which
touch the realm of science fiction, have prompted both excitement
and fear (The
Chronicle, September 10, 2004.) A nanometer is one-billionth
of a meter, or roughly 100,000 times smaller than the thickness of a
strand of human hair.
One use of
such technology, for example, could involve implanting nano-sized
sensors in the human body to monitor a person's physical health. But
privacy advocates are concerned that such information could be
stolen. Environmentalists are worried that nano-sized particles
could cause a new form of difficult-to-control pollution. Even
supporters of nanotechnology agree that these questions deserve more
study lest the public reject the technology the way some people,
especially in Europe, have refused to eat food from genetically
modified crops (The
Chronicle, April 14, 2000).
Until now,
the federal government has been financing research to develop
nanotechnology -- a total of $1-billion this year -- but has spent
relatively little on studying its social ramifications, and the
projects it has supported have not significantly involved social
scientists.
Since 2000
the NSF has financed 21 large research projects to develop the
actual technology. While those awards required that the recipients
devote some time to studying the technology's social implications,
the social-implications research appears to have been limited in
scope. Several projects involved no more than some public seminars,
said Ira M. Bennett, a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State who
has tracked the social-implications studies.
The NSF has
previously financed some separate grants for social-implications
research through its division of social and behavioral sciences. But
those amounted to only about $10-million from 1997 to 2004,
according to Mr. Bennett. The NSF's latest round of grants, awarded
last week, will increase that significantly.
The Arizona
State center will focus on issues including privacy, security, and
the technology's potential applications in enhancing the human body.
It will also experiment with a novel approach teaming social and
natural scientists to try to steer the development of the
technology, as it is occurring, to maximize beneficial effects and
minimize negative ones.
The Santa
Barbara center will study, among other topics, society's perception
of risks surrounding the new technology.
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