“Like any powerful new technology, nanotech also has the potential for unintended consequences,” said NSF director Rita Colwell, “which is precisely why we can’t allow the societal implications to be an afterthought. The programme has to build in a concern for those implications from the start.”
The cash will enable David Baird, a philosopher at the University of South Carolina, and colleagues to set up a dialogue between as many points of view as possible. “Ethicists and other scholars need to understand what’s possible in the lab,” said Baird, who also believes that researchers need to consider societal implications from the start. “Students who are trained now in the right interdisciplinary setting - one where technical experts can work with people from fields such as law, journalism, medicine, the humanities, social science, or even science fiction and art - will become a cadre of scientists, engineers and scholars who are used to thinking about the societal and technical problems side-by-side.”
The second award goes to sociologist Lynne Zucker and her team at the University of California, Los Angeles. Zucker will study how nanotechnology expertise makes its way from the laboratory to the marketplace. “This is not something that happens automatically and many start-up companies fail because it’s not done well,” she said. The UCLA team will set up a database of small start-ups active in nanotechnology and look at the factors that influence how well ideas succeed in the marketplace. “It will be a resource for scientists, journalists, policymakers - everyone,” added Zucker. “It will help us understand how the knowledge is transmitted, what facilitates that transfer, what blocks it and what works well.”