As our societies are asked to support nanotechnology in fairly extravagant fashion, it might be expected that more and more people will begin to wonder what precisely is being supported, and why. In Lund, Sweden, near where I live, one of Europe’s largest laboratories for nanoscience is currently being built at great expense to the European and Swedish taxpayers. In the United States, programs of nanotechnology are being funded by the federal government, primarily, as is the custom over there, for what is seen as their military potential. And in Brussels, the commission of the European Union is spending sizeable sums of money to fund scientists like yourselves in the hope that nanoscience or nanotechnology – the terms seem to be used fairly interchangeably - will contribute to improving the competitiveness of European corporations in the proverbial global marketplace. But nobody really knows what nanoscience has to offer.

And that is where we – that is, social and human scientists who are concerned with science and technology – might well have a contribution to make. But that contribution depends on which of us you ask. For we speak with different tongues, we provide different kinds of advice, and we attribute different meanings to the science and technology that we are concerned with. There are at least three rather different sorts of social students of science and technology, who roughly correspond to the academic divisions between economics, sociology and history, and we have developed three rather different ways to talk about scientific and technological change (Jamison and Hård 2003). Let me very briefly try to tell you what we have to say in relation to nanotechnology.

On the one hand, there are those who refer to technology primarily as innovations, and tell stories about turning science into marketable products. Their perspective, or approach, is the dominant one. It is the one that the European Commission is sponsoring, most recently in its report, “Converging Technologies – Shaping the Future of European Societies” – which was published last year by a group with the impressive name, “Foresighting the New Technology Wave” (HLEG 2004). To put it mildly, the group presents a very optimistic view of nanotechnology and its implications for society. The story-line is one of progress, and as the title suggests, convergence. The new advanced technologies – “nano, bio, info” – are linked to all of the other sciences and technologies – “cogno, socio, anthro, philo, geo, eco, urbo, orbo, macro, macro” – in the overall concept of converging technologies, or CTs for short. CTs, it is suggested, have four major characteristics. They form an “invisible technical infrastructure for human action – analogous to the visible infrastructure provided by buildings and cities”. They have an “unlimited reach”: the experts tell us that “it would appear that nothing can escape the reach of CTs and that the mind, social interactions, communication, and emotional states can all be engineered.”

This leads to the third characteristic, “engineering the Mind and the Body” and in the report it is claimed that “humans may be drawn to surrender more and more of their freedom and responsibility to a mechanical world that acts for them.” The final characteristic of CTs is their specificity: “research on the interface between nano and biotechnology allows for the targeted delivery of designer pharmaceuticals that are tailored to an individual’s genome in order to effect a cure without side effects. More generally, the convergence of enabling technologies and knowledge systems can be geared to address very specific tasks.”

The report goes on to discuss each of these characteristics and suggest policies for the European Union in order to maximize the benefits and minimize the costs. The report is based on a rather straightforward cost-benefit analysis, and as the quotations indicate, there can be little question that these particular social and human scientists envision a good many benefits. But to their credit, they also do try to identify costs, particularly to human freedoms as we have known them and tried to defend them in the past. The social challenge of nanotechnology is primarily seen to be an ethical one.

Other social scientists tend to have other ways of talking about the social aspects of nanotechnology, and it can be interesting to contrast the EU report with a study on nanoscience that is currently being conducted by Mikael Johansson, an anthropologist in Sweden. For Johansson, and many other sociologists and anthropologists who approach science and technology from what might be termed a sociological perspective, the interesting questions are not what nanotechnology might mean for society – that is, its transformative potential, as the authors of the EU report put it – but rather what society means for nanotechnology. For Johansson, as for many other sociologists of science and technology, it is the nanoscientists themselves and their perceptions of society that are of interest, and so he has spent time interviewing some of them and spending time with them, in order to understand how they perceive nanotechnology.

As might be expected, the scientists he has interviewed are more concerned with getting funding for their research than in speculating about the future. As has been suggested by other sociologists, scientists in action are perhaps best thought of as strategic actors, who make use of various opportunities and what are often called network connections to pursue their scientific careers. What has been stressed by many of these sociologists is the way in which scientists “enroll” others in their activities.

The scientists interviewed by Johansson did not seem to be all that concerned with either the transformative potential of nanotechnology nor with the eventual social problems that might develop; the social implications of nanoscience were rather a kind of resource to be mobilized in pursuit of a career. As one of Johansson’s interviewed scientists puts it, “to succeed one need both to be a good scientist and to build a broad network. The network is important when seeking funding. Everybody knows everybody in the business and it is important to be considered serious to get funding. One must make a name for oneself inside the network.” (Johansson 2004: 20).

From the sociological, or anthropological point of view, the meaning of nanoscience is constructed by different groups in society to serve their purposes. As such, the social aspects are seen from what might be termed an actor’s perspective. In the case of nanotechnology, however, it is quite difficult to identify the relevant actors, or “actor networks” as they have been referred to in this approach. According to recent findings in the so-called Eurobarometer, most people in Europe don’t know anything about nanotechnology and they have extremely vague ideas about what it might or might not mean for them (Gaskell et al 2005). Of course, this is likely to change quite rapidly; and there are already signs that at least some interest groups are getting more involved in the public debate. As has been the case with the other advanced technologies that have come along, however, European societies tend to react in a rather polarized manner to new technology. Both nuclear energy and biotechnology have led to widespread political controversies, and, in both cases, the social implications are still being debated.

It has been in large measure in order to learn from the experiences of nuclear energy and biotechnology and avoid some of the social conflicts that occurred that some of us within the field of science and technology studies have tried to develop methods for carrying out what we call technology assessment. The idea came from the US in the 1970s, where there was an Office of Technology Assessment established in the Congress, before it was closed down in 1996. In Europe, technology assessment has been conducted in many countries, and there have been many different approaches, but the general tendency, if we can speak of one, has been to try to involve the general public as widely as possible in the assessment activity. If societies are to make use of science and technology in an effective manner, then it is necessary for as many people in the society to have informed opinions about these matters and become what some of us have started to term scientific citizens.

As far as I know, it is only in the Netherlands, at the Rathenau Institute, that there has been a serious effort to conduct technology assessment in relation to nanotechnology. As with technology assessment projects elsewhere, a range of activities have been conducted, in order to educate the society about the technology in question. The first step, as is common in such exercises, was what might be termed mapping. The technology assessors tried to get an overview of the possible social problems that might come to be associated with nanotechnology. We can call it problem identification.

There was an initial study in which a “dream scenario” was contrasted with a “horror scenario” in relation to a number of societal issues for different fields of nanotechnology. As with all technology assessments the idea is to help society reach some sort of consensus, or agreement, about the social aspects of technology, and so it is important to first try to locate the potential sources of disagreement. You can think of technology assessment as an early warning system, a way for societies to resolve or at least foresee conflicts before they happen.

The assessment of nanotechnology is now in a second phase, in which focus groups have been conducted, and a discussion has been held in the Parliament. A number of panels are being constituted around specific applications, and they will then produce reports about the implications of the different applications. Like the so-called consensus conferences that have been carried out in Denmark, the idea with the panels will be to make it easier to involve interested members of the public in the assessment process, and hopefully reach a more socially grounded consensus or agreement about what needs to be done to make appropriate use of nanotechnology.

Let us take a quick look at the map that the Dutch assessors came up with

Societal issues and scenarios for different fields of applications in nanotechnology (adapted from van Est and van Keulen 2004: 75)

Field of application	Societal issue	Dream scenario	Horror scenario
Nanomaterials / industrial production	health- and environment	sustainability	nanoasbestos
Nanoelectronics	privacy	'smart' products	big brother
Nanotechnology in medical sphere	predictive medicine	early diagnostics	genetic coercion
Military technology	arms race	safe world	new weapons, terrorists
General / innovation	economy	economic growth	structural unemployment

Such an assessment of nanotechnology would be useful throughout Europe, and it could perhaps be something that we could also consider doing within the NaPa project. A first step could be a round of visits to the participating institutions, where we in the advisory committee could present some of the methods and approaches of science and technology studies and technology assessment. Such visits could at the very least serve to initiate discussions about the social aspects of nanotechnology among the participants and with your students, as well.

For, as I see it, the most important social aspect of any technology is educational in the broadest sense. The public needs to be educated, and the promoters, developers, critics and regulators of the technology need to be educated. In a sense, we all need to take on what might be called a hybrid identity, combining knowledge of science and technology with knowledge of the relevant social contexts in which science and technology are put to use.

Technology assessment in its various guises can be considered one aspect of what Mikael Hård and I, in our new book, Hubris and Hybrids, refer to as “cultural appropriation” (Hård and Jamison 2005). Our book is an attempt to place science and technology in a broader cultural perspective. The general point we try to make through our historical examples is that it takes time and a good deal of effort before human societies are able to use science and technology appropriately.

Using science and technology appropriately means, for one thing, that we know how to talk about it and that we have what might be called a collective shared understanding of the relevant science or technology, that is, that we are scientifically literate. But it also means that we have appropriate institutions and cultural forms for making use of the scientific and technological opportunities at our disposal. In the past, appropriation has meant rather fundamental changes in both identity, competence, and the routines of everyday life. As we have started to see with genetic engineering, and as we might expect to see with nanotechnology in the not too distant future, appropriation means learning to live with new technologies. And that requires changes from all of us, both the producers and the users, both the scientists and the public. We might say that in order to share the benefits, we also need to share the responsibilities.

References

Gaskell, George, et al (2005) Imagining nanotechnology: cultural support for te4chnological innovation in Europe and the United States, in Public Understanding of Science, 14: 81-90

HLEG (2004) Converging Technologies – Shaping the Future of European Societies, a report to the European Commission, accessed via the internet.

Hård, Mikael and Andrew Jamison (2005) Hubris and Hybrid: A Cultural History of Technology and Science. New York: Routledge

Jamison, Andrew and Mikael Hård (2003) The Story-Lines of Technological Change: Innovation, Construction, and Appropriation, in Technology Analysis and Strategic Management, 15, 1: 81-92

Johansson, Mikael (2004) Scientific and public notions of an emerging science. Real and imagined nanoscience, in VEST, Journal for Science and Technology Studies, 17, 3-4: 7-24

van Est, Rinie and van Keulen, Ira (2004) “Small technology – Big Consequences”: Building up the Dutch debate on nanotechnology from the bottom, in Technikfolgen-abschätzung – Theorie und Praxis, 13, 3: 72-79

This article is based on a talk prepared for the meeting of the Emerging Nanopatterning Methods (NaPa) project, Lausanne, September 13, 2005