Nano and Ethics? Yes and No

  Nigel M. de S. Cameron, Ph.D., Director
  Center on Nanotechnology and Society

The Center on Nanotechnology and Society is engaged in research and debate on the questions raised by nanotechnology for the social order. The human genome project raised such basic issues for human values that considerable efforts (including federal expenditures) were directed to research and educational efforts focused on its implications for "ethical, legal and social" issues (the shorthand term is ELSI). And while there are various views of the effectiveness of the several aspects of the human genome ELSI project, there is no doubt that helping public debate and understanding is healthy - not least when science raises scary issues.

So an emphasis on the ELSI dimensions of nano has been encouraged by Congress, and lies behind the work of this Center at Illinois Institute of Technology. Our agenda is framed by what we are calling NELSI: nano ethical, legal and social issues. Alongside the development of events and publications, we shall soon be launching a special web-based archive of worldwide discussion on these questions - NELSI Global. The next newsletter will give much more detail on our NELSI Global Project.

But where is ethics in all this? From one point of view, it is hard to see what "nano ethics" means. It isn't a special department of ethics, or a special kind of ethics. Genetic ethics makes sense (though no one much uses the term), as does engineering ethics, as they are focused on special sets of issues raised by a technology or a discipline. Business ethics has something of a revival after each wave of corporate scandals. Bioethics, a widely used term that covers everything from the old "medical ethics" issues like organ transplants and euthanasia to the hot button policy questions of embryonic stem cell research and cloning, tracks the meeting point of medicine, the life sciences, and public policy - and is now the subject of the UNESCO Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights.

Whether "nano ethics" fits the pattern remains to be seen. Nanoscale research and development covers so vast an area - in materials, disciplines, applications, and uses - that it seems to raise just about every conceivable ethics issue. All the way from the "nano divide" (will nano make the rich richer and the poor poorer?) to privacy to safety and, finally, to the outlandish ideas of sci-fi futurists who want to change human nature itself - "nano ethics" seems to raise many questions, though mostly questions we already know very well. A recent article in Business Week suggested that the word nano would soon disappear, as everything would tend to work on the nanoscale and the nano novelty will be lost. Perhaps this was an overstatement, but the point is well taken.

Like bioethics, the discussion of nano ethics fits best in the context of legal and social issues: the NELSI nexus. Ethics finds its relevance in the public square when it engages the principles that determine policy - the terms under which we live together in community, tackle common tasks (such as publicly funded science), and accord each other freedom to disagree.

Perhaps the most profound meaning of the emerging NELSI debate lies just here: that nano, if its boosters are to be believed, will greatly increase our power over ourselves and our environment, and therefore - as C.S. Lewis famously said in his essay on "The Abolition of Man" - the power of some people over other people, with nature (in this case on the nanoscale) as their instrument. It is at this point that each of the most obvious dimensions of NELSI comes together: for what is it that the nano divide, the threats to privacy, and transhumanist proposal have in common, other than the specter of the exercise of such a power by some over others?

The NELSI task is therefore very great, since its questions are not merely sectional, as in the application of one or another aspect of a technology, but systemic - as the powers granted to humans by their mastery of matter are raised to a very high degree, and as the potential for good and ill rises in proportion. Never, perhaps, has ethics been so necessary, or so integrated with the meaning and task of technology and the good of the social order.

Nigel M. de S. Cameron, Ph.D., is the Director of the Center on Nanotechnology and Society and President of the Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future.