Time to Re-focus: the National Nanotechnology Initiative Re-authorization
November 19, 2007
The 2003 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act, which set out a legislative framework for the National Nanotechnology Initiative, is up for re-authorization. This process offers a unique opportunity to those who have raised concerns about the implementation (and to some extent the language) of the original Act.
While the 2003 Act set out concerns about safety issues and broader societal and ethical implications, a key problem with the development of the NNI can be traced back to the Act’s failure to ensure that they would be followed through with appropriate urgency and resources. Since many parties are involved in the NNI (including a couple of dozen agencies as well as the National Academies, who were required by the Act to report on the operation of the NNI), it is hard to assign responsibility. But there seems little doubt about the failure – on both scores, EHS (environmental health and safety) and NELSI (nano ethical, legal and societal issues). While good work has been funded, both of these elements have received short shrift. Parsimony on the EHS front has led business and environmental leaders to combine in pressing for a major increase in safety research. Delay and limited action on the NELSI front has left the US well behind our European competitors in seeking to show how serious we are about following through on the implications of this transformative technology – and enabled some key individuals, under the auspices of the NSF, to frame nanoscale technological convergence along transhumanist lines (in the infamous conference document on “improving human performance” and its successor volumes).
Matters were not helped by the National Academies’ report (required by the statute), which dismissed concerns about the implications of artificial intelligence and the enhancement of human intelligence (specified in the statute as two out of six areas of special concern) as “science fiction” not worthy of consideration. Or the recent congressional Joint Economic Committee report’s proposal that the “singularity” (when, as some suggest, artificial intelligence will surpass human, and take over) may be expected as soon as 2020.
Congress has already shown concern at neglect on the NELSI front. In the FY2006 appropriations legislation, the conference report included these words: “The conferees are aware of concerns that insufficient attention and study has been directed toward the ethical dimensions of nanotechnology research. . . . The conferees expect OSTP [White House Office of Science and Technology Policy] to follow the pattern established for the human genome project, allocating three percent of funding to ethical, legal and social issues research.”
This is the context for the Second Annual Conference on Nanopolicy being convened on November 30 at the National Press Club by the Center on Nanotechnology and Society, with a focus on risk – both safety risk and ethical risk. Speakers include representatives from the American Chemistry Council and the AFL-CIO. (See nano-and-society.org for details.) It is also a major theme of our recently-published book, Nanoscale: Issues and Perspectives for the Nano Century.
It is to be hoped that the re-authorization process will result in legislation that ensures that both NELSI and EHS are pulled into the mainstream of the NNI, as we seek to develop the extraordinary promise of emerging technologies on the nanoscale.
