Whether it is actually used, the science is referenced in everything from state-of-the-art golf clubs to the iPod Nano. College kids and middle-aged corporate Americans alike are trying to tap into what the National Science Foundation predicts will be a one trillion dollar industry by 2015.

A new study by UW-Madison professor of life sciences communication Dietram Scheufele shows that although people are generally uninformed yet optimistic about developing nanotechnology, the ethical and environmental concerns continue to raise red flags for the public.

High-tech, science-gone-bad scenarios abound and may influence how the public forms its opinions about widely misunderstood topics like nanotechnology, according to Robert Hamers, chair of the chemistry department at UW-Madison and associate director of the campus Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center.

“Depending on how you address [nanotechnology], you can always pander to people’s hopes or you can pander to people’s fears,” Hamers said. “You can sort of drive them one way or the other on the issue.”

Nanotechnology is a broad field that already has applications in hundreds of products currently on the market, according to Scheufele.

“The funding [for nanotechnology] has actually gone up since 2001,” Scheufele said. “The funding has almost quadrupled over the course of the last eight years in the U.S., and the U.S. definitely being the biggest spender [federally] in the world on research and development on nanotechnology.”

Madison is no exception, according to professor of material sciences and engineering Max Lagally.

“One of our electrical engineering professors has just developed the world’s fastest flexible electronics [using nanotechnology],” Lagally said. “We’re basically at the forefront in research in many areas.”

Nanotechnology refers to the manipulation of matter on a molecular level, in sizes anywhere from one nanometer in length to 100 nanometers. This modification of molecular structure allows scientists to give materials new qualities.

“We’re talking about a size scale that is approximately 10 atoms across,” Lagally said.
This expanding branch of technology, which has brought Americans everything from stain-resistant pants to scratch-resistant paint, remains the subject of both ethical controversy and social critique, according to Scheufele.

“We’ve seen that people are not very aware and not extremely knowledgeable about the new technologies,” Scheufele said.

Religion meets science

In findings published in Nov. 2007, Scheufele and colleagues discovered that the public’s opinions of nanotechnology were being shaped more than ever by what Scheufele called a “perceptive filter,” in many cases based on the subject’s values and religiosity.

“For less religious respondents ... if they see the benefits, they support nano,” Scheufele said. “For more religious respondents, what we’ve found is that relationship is much weaker.”

Scheufele speculated that much of the controversy is based in the emotionally charged public battles over stem cells and cloning.

“The fact that we’re seeing similar patterns [of acceptance] for issues like embryonic stem-cell research ... suggests that nanotechnology is, for a lot of people, given how little they know, being lumped together with a lot of other scientific breakthroughs,” Scheufele said.

Lagally argued, however, that any comparison to the ethics battle surrounding stem cells is ill placed.

“It’s not like stem cells,” he said. “We’re not going to breed anything or create any life out of nano-objects. As particles go, they’re just like particles we’ve been breathing forever.”

The public is often dominated by fear, Hamers said.

“I think some of these ethical and moral issues are a little bit contrived. I think some of them come out of the science fiction literature or playing on people’s fears,” Hamers said. “It’s only controversial if you ask certain questions like, ‘Is it safe or is it not safe?’”

However, according to Scheufele, the concern over ethical and other controversial issues is heavy enough to warrant 3 percent of all money spent on research to be spent on the “ethical, legal and social implications” of nanotechnology.

“The legal implications obviously have something to do with intellectual property, so creating new materials that only are slight modifications at the molecular level, is that a completely new patent?” Scheufele said.

According to Scheufele, ethical implications often deal with human enhancement and the possibility that nanotechnology may create new ways of enhancing health and medicine.

It may be that questions of ethics will be answered by the next generation of scientists, however.

“To say that nanotechnology is morally unacceptable is to let fear and ignorance of the general public drive the direction of scientific inquiry and development,” said UW senior Joel Thomas, co-president of the UW-Madison student chapter of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

However, one of the biggest concerns, according to
Scheufele, is not health but the potential for development of very small surveillance devices.

“[Invasion of privacy] is something that in all of our surveys since 2004 ... has really come out as one of the bigger concerns of the general public,” Scheufele said.

But the struggle for a clear-cut answer in a moral realm might be impossible, warned Hamers.

“It’s not ‘is it good?’ or ‘is it bad?’” Hamers said. “It’s often, ‘is it better than what we have?’”

After working with Hamers, UW senior Jake Henrichs learned first-hand about the nanotechnology field.

“There’s always going to be people trying to use new technology for unethical reasons,” Henrichs said. “I just like to think that people are going to make the right, ethical choice.”

The next generation

It will be students like Henrichs who will expand the field of nanotechnology in the coming years.
“This is something that really will have huge economic impact and certainly something that is worth paying attention to,” Scheufele said. “Not just as a scientific issue, but as something that will open up new career fields ... and that will certainly influence a lot of existing career fields.”

“For young people ... there’s enough hype at the moment [and] enough companies that are interested in seeing what can be done at that [nano-]scale,” Lagally said. “It’s an excellent opportunity for being part of something that essentially grows exponentially for the next 40 years.”

Nanotechnology is quickly becoming what Lagally referred to as a “disruptive technology,” in much the same way as trains, automobiles and computers.

“They all changed the way we lived in a significant way,” Lagally said.

Additionally, disruptive technologies follow a similar pattern, acording to Lagally.

“Typically they have an S-shaped curve that starts [at] some time and ends about 80 years later,” Lagally said. “What folks are saying is that the nanotechnology revolution started in the late ’90s [and has] 65 years to live before it flattens out.”

The nano-future

Further developments in nanotechnology may solve problems from chronic disease to the energy crisis, according to Hamers.

“I feel very strongly that if you look at ... the pathway toward energy independence [and] the pathway toward reducing air pollution, so many of those, the only approach we have that looks even viable is through the use of nanotechnology and nano-materials,” Hamers said.

According to Scheufele, the three biggest spenders nationally on nanotechnology are the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Health and the Department of Defense, illustrating the wide applicability of the innovations nanotechnology provides.

For Scheufele, indicators like that only reiterate his belief that nanotechnology is going to bring some of the future’s greatest advancements.

“There’s really a lot of enthusiasm among the scientific community about the economic impact [of nanotechnology],” Scheufele said, “about the ability to reduce pollution, to create new filters, to really solve a lot of the problems we’ve been struggling with for a long time.”