Nano - technology : plus ça change . . . ?

This book is a collection of existing articles together with several original contributions that “add to a slowly accumulating literature on Nanotechnology (NT) within the Science Technology and Society field”. That literature in turn reflects an emerging wave of NT products. All this is happening some 50 years after Richard Feynman’s famous speech at Caltech: “There’s plenty of room at the bottom”. Many people will remember the “Mighty Micro” predictions of the late 1970’s, which proved substantially correct. We now have high performance consumer products containing engineered N-particles (e.g., my tennis racket), together with forecasts in the book that “the technology of the vanishingly small will be expansively influential, in the next couple of decades”. Materials 10 times stronger than steel and a fraction of the weight, efficient solar cells and new types of cancer treatment are but a few examples. Although NT is important, the question I would like to consider in this review is whether it really is as “special” as the editors suggest. In particular, does this NT & Society discourse differ from an earlier IT discourse, or from a more general literature on business and ethics (BE). Descriptions of the social benefits of NT products comprise what is referred to (in BE) as “The narrative of the Cornucopians”. “Doomsayers”, on the other hand are telling a different story of “dust” and “grey goo”: the left-overs from a Global binge in which out-of-control nano-replicators consume and ravage the entire biosphere.1 Both camps seem to agree, however, that “NT is outpacing our collective ability to direct (its) course”. Some infer from this that “we” should try to envision the society that we