Vincent Caprio, executive director of the NanoBusiness Commercialization Association, asked me to contribute to his series of interviews with influential voices in the science and business of nanotech. So, I interviewed Andrew Maynard, director of the Risk Science Center at the University of Michigan, who has been studying risks associated with nanotech for more than a decade. He had some interesting things to say about assessing risk based on science, rather than political pressure, the need to alter one’s views as more becomes known about nanotech and the risk of overhyping a technology. Here’s an excerpt:
When Andrew Maynard, director of the Risk Science Center at the University of Michigan, read the text of a recent lawsuit by consumer advocates against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which claims the FDA is failing to regulate nanomaterials in products, one phrase jumped out at him. The groups used the words “fundamentally unique properties” when referring to nanoscale ingredients.
The phrase, in fact, comes directly from marketing material of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. So, in one sense, the nanotech industry is a victim of its own public relations, Maynard believes. A phrase used to promote nanotech commercialization is being thrown back at nanotech advocates by those who would use the same logic to demand strict regulations.
“There is an assumption that you can have everything your own way,” Maynard says. “You can say something was unique and important and world-changing, selling the hype, and yet not really understanding what the long-term consequences of that hype are.”
This is what Maynard does for a living. He tries to reach beyond hype and beyond gloom to assess and communicate the real risks associated with emerging technologies, including nanotechnology. But he approaches these assessments from a starting point that seems increasingly difficult to achieve in these polarized political times – one based on scientific principles rather than political agenda.
Read the whole thing here.
Anyone who thinks that the “politically correct” class is not going to trot out, once again, the “precautionary principle” is simply naive or dreaming. It will look a lot like the case against GM food.
The most interesting point in the interview is how “unwanted regulation” springs from the scientists’ own hype about what they are creating. Naturally, in trying to get research grants or funding for the creation and exploration of the properties of new products, scientists tend to overemphasize the newness and uniqueness of the product. But the newness and uniqueness also scares people.
Maybe the focus needs to be less on enlightening the public and more on enlightening the scientists. Scientists have to acquire the self-discipline to not hype what they are doing in order to get funding.
Gloria, IIRC, this sort of damage to a field is at least as old as the late 1940s. When the US had a nuclear monopoly, in order to justify defense budget cuts, the effectiveness and horrors of nuclear weapons were strongly touted, to imply we had less need for conventional forces. When the “peace” movement began to take hold in the 1950s, these same platitudes were now turned against building nuclear weapons and, by association with “Project Plowshare”, against nuclear power as well. Of course, that was because other people might turn the weapons against us. The dislike of nuke powerplants eventually became detached from weapons somewhat, and focused on criticism of the wastes, while avoiding support for nuke technologies that consumed wastes as well.
The revelations about support for the “peace” movement after the Soviet files opened for a brief time in the early 1990s, all the way through the “Greenham Conmmons” camp-out, was eye-opening for me. The KGB had been careful enough, according to Klehr and Haynes, to use 6 layers of cutouts to funnel funding to Greenham Commons demonstrators.