From: Michael M. Butler (mmb@spies.com)
Date: Tue Feb 04 2003 - 00:09:35 MST
FROM NANOTECHNOLOGY'S SIDELINES, ONE MORE WARNING
February 3, 2003
By BARNABY J. FEDER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/03/technology/03NANO.html?ex=1045299506&ei=1.33
&en=dc4c6b06081c0f81
The ETC group releases nervous commentary on nanotechnology
in the same way a lot of companies update their software:
each version is compatible with what was said before but
adds new features.
The latest effort by ETC - which pronounces its name "et
cetera" - is an 80-page illustrated manifesto called "The
Big Down," its most elaborate effort yet to generate alarm
among the global network of social, labor and environmental
groups.
Nanotechnology refers to the manipulation of matter at the
scale of atoms and molecules to create novel forms of
common materials, like carbon molecules arranged in
nanotubes, which are 100 times as strong as steel but much
lighter. Proponents describe a future in which
nanotechnology will lead to other wonders, like minute
diagnostic systems to detect cancers when they are no more
than a few cells in size, or data-storage systems that
could contain the Library of Congress in a device the size
of a sugar cube.
But "The Big Down" warns of the risks of allowing big
business to pursue and promote technologies whose health
and environmental consequences may not be fully understood.
The rhetoric is hardly dispassionate. "Today," it warns,
"mighty Goliath (industrial corporations) has learned his
lesson and is exploiting the power of small to become
mightier still, while little David (society) cannot even
see his opponent."
That might all seem like ignorable fringe-group ranting if
ETC and its executive director, Pat Roy Mooney, did not
already have a reputation for successfully stirring things
up. During the 1990's, they faced down Monsanto and other
chemical giants in a public debate over the ethics of
creating genetically modified plants whose seeds were
sterile.
And like the manifesto, Mr. Mooney is more often cautiously
earnest than shrill. "We are not assuming this is an evil,
awful technology," Mr. Mooney said last week. "I suspect
quite a bit can be done that's useful." The danger, he
said, is that governments and public interest groups do not
have enough control over assessing risks and setting
priorities.
Mr. Mooney began distributing the report 10 days ago in
Porto Alegre, Brazil, at the World Social Forum, a
gathering held annually to coincide with the far more
well-heeled World Economic Summit in Davos, Switzerland. It
is also posted on ETC's Web site (www.etcgroup.org).
ETC consists of just seven employees in Winnipeg, Manitoba,
its headquarters, and in Carrboro, N.C.; Mexico City; and
Oxford, England. Its annual budget is roughly $525,000,
most of it raised from donors, like the Rockefeller
Foundation, that have long been involved with the needs of
developing countries.
Mr. Mooney, 55, who has been legally blind since the age of
12, is a native of the prairies near Winnipeg. He
cheerfully admits that he dropped out of high school
shortly before he would have been kicked out for ignoring
his studies.
His résumé includes working as a consultant for the United
Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization as a young man
and subsequent involvement in a wide range of development
projects in Asia, Africa and Latin America. But he has no
credentials as a researcher in nanotechnology, a field that
takes its name from the word nanometer - one-billionth of a
meter.
In a telephone interview last week, Mihail C. Roco, the
head of the United States government's National
Nanotechnology Initiative, dismissed ETC as "nonscientific"
and "a group that fights against technology." In fact,
though, Mr. Mooney agrees completely with authorities like
Mr. Roco that nanotechnology is the next big thing.
But Mr. Mooney has trouble setting aside his fears that the
new technology will go awry. He is not particularly worried
about tiny robots creating copies of themselves until they
crowd out human life - the "gray goo" catastrophe posited
by some scientists and popularized in Michael Crichton's
recent novel, "Prey."
Instead, Mr. Mooney fears what he calls green goo:
microorganisms that have been manipulated through
nanotechnology to take over the function of machines but
that begin reproducing out of control. He worries about
environmental damage and diseases driven by unexpected
responses of people and other living things to the
accumulation in their systems of artificial particles the
Earth has never seen before.
Nanotechnology experts who have been paying closer
attention to ETC and Mr. Mooney are less dismissive than
Mr. Roco. "Making fun of Pat Mooney is not the way to go
here," said Christine Peterson, co-founder and president of
the Foresight Institute, nanotechnology's leading forum for
discussion. "This is a sincere, smart man who doesn't have
any trouble with logic."
Another expert who voices at least grudging respect is
Kevin D. Ausman, executive director for operations at the
Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology at
Rice University, a new federally financed research center.
"ETC is the first nonscientific group to start to address
the issue of toxic impact of nanomaterials," Mr. Ausman
said. But he expressed dismay that ETC is warning of risks
he considers to be in the realm of science fiction, like
green goo.
Putting Mr. Mooney most at odds with the nanotechnology
community is his call for a moratorium on research and
commercialization until international agreements have been
reached on ways to assess and monitor nanotechnology's
risks. Mr. Roco and others say that such problems are
already being addressed and that a research moratorium
would impede scientists' understanding of nanoparticles -
natural and artificial - that already exist, while delaying
the potential health and environmental benefits of new
nanoproducts and systems.
But Ms. Peterson, of the Foresight Institute, recalls Mr.
Mooney's response when she questioned his strategy of
calling for a moratorium: "It gets people's attention."
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