The Most Important Story of Our Time — and the Only Journalist Covering It
The hyperlocal news site New Haven Independent seems an unlikely place to find the most in-depth, understandable, up-to-date news about nanotechnology. Yet there it is. Nestled among features about the gelato queen of New Haven and how to get the city to fix your cracked sidewalks — the meat and potatoes of local journalism — you’ll find the work of Gwyneth Shaw, the only independent journalist covering the nanotech revolution full-time in language that we all can understand.
It seems strange that decisions are being made right now about development of technology that will have an impact of everybody’s lives in the next century and beyond, yet very few people write about it independently. I tried it for a little while, gave it my all between 2001 and 2008, helped found a magazine that covered it, and launched a groundbreaking blog with an independent voice, but in the end I could not make a living at it. So I’ve largely moved on except for this column and freelance nanotech pieces here and there.
That is why Shaw’s reporting has intrigued me over the past year or so. She essentially is picking up where I left off, covering nanotech news with a skeptical reporter’s eye. Barnaby Feder at the New York Times and Rick Weiss of the Washington Post, the two others who used to cover nanotech with any depth, are no longer doing it. Science reporters at newspapers around the world are taking buyouts and getting laid off. So, without Shaw’s reporting, much of what you read about nanotechnology would be heavily influenced by press releases written by those who believe it will either save the world or destroy it.
I spoke with Shaw recently and asked her how the burden, and fun, of nanotech fell on her and the New Haven Independent. It was, initially, through a grant from the CS Fund that she was brought on board by Independent editor Paul Bass about 18 months ago. At the time, she “knew zero” about nanotechnology. What she did know, though, is how to be a good reporter — which means knowing the right questions to ask. It means cutting through the half-truths and spins being lobbed her way by the great many people with agendas who do write about nanotech.
Shaw had the right background for spin-detection. Before nanotech, she covered politics for the Baltimore Sun and the Orlando Sentinel.
“I covered the Senate for a couple of years,” Shaw says. “And there’s nothing that will make you hate journalism more than covering the Senate, because you spend your whole life chasing people around who do nothing but spin you.” Not only that, but she was one of dozens of journalists chasing the same political stories. So, why was she participating in what Shaw calls this “particular farce”?
Shaw decided she would rather blaze her own trail as one of the only independent journalists writing about nanotechnology full-time.
A year and a half after taking on the beat, Shaw has come to many of the same conclusions I have — that because so much is unknown about nanotech, it leaves those with their own agenda room to fill in the gaps.
An editor gets a press release from a local university about their latest research into nanotech-enabled cancer treatments. There have been some amazing developments in nanomedicine selectively killing cancer cells while leaving healthy ones alone. Yet, an editor might also read something about how watchdog groups claim nanoparticles are potentially bad for the environment and could actually give you cancer. Whom to believe?
“It’s quite clear that there are some things that these materials can do that are amazing. There’s no question about that,” Shaw says. “I think it’s quite clear that there are at least some places where these materials could do some real harm. I think what’s frustrating as a journalist is nobody seems to know really the hard-and-fast answers to how do you categorize both of those areas.”
Shaw describes the strange, bipolar nature of the carbon nanotube, materials that hold great promise for everything from computer chips to drug delivery. There are concerns from some quarters, though, that they could cause cancer, although the evidence is far from conclusive. “It’s either going to kill you or cure you or both,” Shaw says, adding with a laugh, “Can we use carbon nanotubes to cure the type of cancer that carbon nanotubes cause?”
Thank you Howard and Gwyneth … this is part of our future together; that is an awesome thing to cover … exciting stuff.
Having engineered two score of nukes, and years of study in nanotechnology, carbon nanofibers, titanium dioxide, and gray goo robots, I have great empathy for these reporters. It is impossible for a layman to distinguish true science from snake oil salesmanship. It is a soup. Technical people fudge in polysyllabic words in order to obtain the grant, corner office, or larger organization. Without post doctoral study, it is impossible to point to the intentional flaw in their documents. After decades, it tends to stimulate a healthy cynicism. Virtually every known, commercially useful, substance on earth carries the charge that it might cause cancer, a charge always leveled by some PhD. Proponents continue to claim that this science will radically alter the world within five years, an unchanging claim for the last two generations.
Nanotechnology means to make pure matter, atom by atom, without any flaws. This does not exist in our world; flaws limit the characteristics of every thing we know. Man now has the capability of making a few miracle substances, exploring an new unknown world of infinite possibilities. If the results are good, society will be transformed. If bad, we are all dead.
If our democracy is to survive, the voters must choice leaders who are both knowledgeable and ethical. Since the potential of nanotechnology is epic, far greater than Columbus’ discovery of the New World, disseminating the truth to the public is vital. However most Americans are not known for their comprehension, and appreciation of science. We value, and pay, strong men to run around with a rubber ball, or anchormen who share the TV screen with scantily clad ladies who gossip on the celebrity sex scandal de jour.
Some body must report the real news. Keep plugging.
I also work in chemical research, and make nanomaterials. No one can make any desired object, “atom by atom”, but there are ways to make many particular things, and the science steadily advances year after year. Nanotechnology is not new. People routinely made gold colloids over 100 years ago. What is relatively recent (last few decades) is the ability to routinely image objects of nanometer dimensions through electron and scanning tip microscopy. When you can image something, you can see what you have made, and work at making desirable variations in the synthesis. With scanning tips, you can manipulate single objects and measure their properties.
Articles in the Media that write about science usually get lots of things wrong. The writer rarely has the required knowledge to get things right, and almost never has the time to research facts properly. They usually listen to left wing policy activists who harp on about cancer scares and other environmental BS, or listen to conspiracy theorists who spout total nonsense interspersed with a few occasional facts. If you want to know about science, look at the original literature, and ignore the rantings of the popular media.
OK, just to nitpick, because that is what we do on the Net…
Mr. Lovy writes “…decisions are being made right now about development of technology that will have an impact of everybody’s lives in the next century and beyond….”
Surely he means “THIS century and beyond”. Make this statement about airplanes 100 years ago and it is about the same. Airplanes are still impacting us in what would then have been “the next century” (here and now), but they certainly started their impact far, far earlier. Surely nanotechnology will not wait 88 years before it really starts to impact us.
Jes’ being picky.
It does kind of show, for almost all of us, that even 12 years in, “the 21st Century” still feels like some kind of far off Star Trek world, not the here and now.
Yeah. I’m old. I was born in 1965 and the 20th-century version of me had thought, for sure, that I’d be getting around in a jet pack or a Jetsons flying car by now. My apologies for the temporal anomaly. Ahead to the 21st century, Warp Factor 10.
Yes, nano-tech has some potential effects that could stretch into the 23rd century.
I am glad she’s asking questions, though. Most of the reporting I see falls flat in that regard. They don’t know to ask or many simply don’t want to ask the necessary questions for fear of losing a source. And then there’s dead-line pressure.
Even some of the better reporters have frequent failures of this nature, including a very good friend of mine. Most of the time, he wasn’t approaching the subject the way reading the article (and other things I knew, of course) led me to do so, so he didn’t think of them.
I’m a little surprised anyone had expectations of making a living as a web-logger.
I blame the feral guberment for the lack of affordable flying cars. There are 2 in the works, though. One restricted to licensed pilots, and the other forever in refinement to make it more and more and more idiot proof rather than good old American liberty and self-responsibility… and, unfortunately, starting to load on restructions.
Gwyneth, thank you for your journalistic work in this field. Please don’t give up. Someone has to make sense of this incredibly arcane and fascinating science for the rest of us to understand it.
Blessings,
Stan
Actually, having a real journalist around to follow a particular niche is gold for long term understanding of where we were and how we got to where we are.
I wish Ms. Shaw the best of good fortune. The future of journalism as we know it will be with people like her.
imho…
the most important news story of our time is actually the end stages of economies built on ponzi schemes. the media, lacking any relative template to compare it, has filed it as an ‘oddity’ as opposed to ‘armageddon’.
EVERY modern country is going to suffer the affliction, to some degree or another. The one word that sums it all up, is ‘variability’.
introduce this level of ‘variability’ in a world that has never experienced something like this before, and the eventual outcome is, at the least, unpredictable.
*****************
as for nano paticles:
yes a paradigm shift is coming, on the tiny little backs of machines, but I’m not sure there is world, as we know it, that wil even have time to notice, let alone benefit.
I sense that Shaw will soon have a significantly larger readership of laypersons. Thanks, Howard. Thanks Glen.
In fact, the greatest ongoing revolution is the biotech revolution.
Once humans become aware that healthy life extension and disease management and then eradication are within humanity’s grasp, there will be such vehement demand for them that governments will be forced to budget increasingly enormous amounts for R&D. To resist the demand would prove inadvisable.
(Certainly nanotech will play a major role in the biotech revolution.)
Meh. My husband is a veteran pharma scientist who’s worked in biotech the last 7-8 years. With the exception of a couple big names like Genentech and Amgen, biotech is still in its infancy, and funded mostly by venture capital. Since the economy tanked, there’s been a sizable contraction in the industry. Add to that the regulatory nightmare called Obamacare, and there are few players left who have both the money and the confidence to take multi-billion-dollar R&D risks.
If we get another four years of OZero and his parasite minions, we will be kissing both biotech and nanotech goodbye.
An editor gets a press release from a local university about their latest research into nanotech-enabled cancer treatments. There have been some amazing developments in nanomedicine selectively killing cancer cells while leaving healthy ones alone. Yet, an editor might also read something about how watchdog groups claim nanoparticles are potentially bad for the environment and could actually give you cancer. Whom to believe?
From what I’ve witnessed reading, casually, about this and all other similarly contentious subjects over the years: the editor, reporter, J-school grad, or otherwise paid employee tends to believe, and push the narrative that the party which stands to make the biggest financial profit from their stance is invariably in the wrong. Profits are bad – Underdogs are good. Big is bad – Small is good. Corporations are bad – Watchdog groups, especially poor, independent watchdog groups are bad.
Just from reading your article, Mr. Lovy, I cannot immediately see whether or not Ms. Shaw is actually independent:
I went to the CS Fund site. Which of the available grants was the wording of her particular grant most similar to? What was the name and description of her particular grant?
Judging solely based on this article you have written (and again, first impressions, I admit — I’ll read her work over the next few weeks) it seems that Md. Shaw is leaning toward the Small, Poor, non-Corporation, non-profit angle. Just my hunch. Corporations can be manipulative, but so can non-profits and “anti-whatever” Movements. And the reporters and so-called “journalists”, in my experience, have tended to, for whatever reasons, side with the latter.
The dearth of nanotech reporting is merely a symptom of a much larger deficit: Nobody understands materials science.
I’m a computer geek, so I like to think that the revolution in information technology is the biggest technological trend of the last 500 years, but of course that’s nonsense. Improvements in microprocessors, memory, and magnetic storage are all driven by advances in materials science. Indeed, if you want to know how fast any industry is likely to grow, from automotive technology to batteries to architecture to aeronautics to medicine, all you have to do is look at the rate at which the materials scientists are making progress on problems that apply to those industries.
Nanotech is just an area where materials science happens to be progressing very rapidly. But the people doing it are the same people who got A’s in all their quantum mechanics courses and actually understand solid-state physics. There aren’t very many of them, but I’m glad that they’re out there. It’s too bad that what they do is largely incomprehensible, because our future depends on them.
TheRadicalModerate
It’s too bad that what they do is largely incomprehensible…
Indeed. From what I can tell, understanding materials science (or quantum mechanics, or solid-state physics) is like trying to learn a language for which you must first learn four or five other languages, each of which has similar prerequisite masteries just to begin.
The general public, barring some quantum leap in education techniques, will never come close to understanding it.
I agree with Mr. Lovy: the general public needs someone like Ms. Shaw to explain this just as it needs meteorologists and seismologists — but only if she is indeed independent and not easily-manipulated.
Even if she is the paragon of impartiality — we still have the problem of education. The general public has been deathly afraid of nuclear power, DDT, and myriad other supposed epic dangers for many years — because the general public is easily-manipulated.
“….but what about nanoscale silver? If that escapes into the environment, will that tip some delicate balance?”
Er no – colloidal silver has been used for many decades now, no prob.
I think it’s great that you’re reporting on nanotech. I think it IS the future of civilization (because I’m uninformed?). My main focus has always been on the research that might lead to photosynthetic hydrogen production with nanotech enzyme chains embedded on graphene or something like that. Seems to me that Krogh’s principle hints that if the plants can do it then we just copy them. Hydrogen economy and we can finally say goodbye to Saudi Arabia and their swords.
SenatorMark4
That was all Greek to me.
But you should remove the apostrophe in “American’s” in the first line of your “Space” link. It’s a plural, not a possessive noun.
The lack of reporting on nanotech and the widespread misunderstanding of it are perfect grounds for government regulation. We can probably count on the feds to slow if not stop it altogether, as in this proposal: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-04-fda-nanotechnology-food.html
Nanotech is just an area where materials science happens to be progressing very rapidly