From Nano‐Ethicswash to Real‐Time Regulation

In the face of . . . the “ethics deficit” that produced the . . . GMO . . . debacle and its subsequent moratoria, this time things need to be done differently. A spoonful of ethics will assist in this explicit path-clearing exercise by assuaging opposition and making nanotechnologies more “palatable” to various publics, thus enabling market acceptance. new collaborative research opportunities (Randles and Berkhout 2006; Dewick et al. 2008). Industrial ecology (IE) and innovation studies (IS) are two such adjacent fields, both relevant to nanotechnology: Systems thinking lies at the heart of both, but dynamics get limited attention in IE, whereas IS could usefully pay attention to the closedloop approach of IE. This column offers some reflections from an IS perspective on IE and nanotechnology—or, to use the current European convention for labeling and abbreviation, nanosciences and nanotechnologies (NN EC 2008)—and sets out to introduce two new ideas. The first, nanoethicswash, is a tongue-in-cheek and deliberately contentious comment on the state of ethics in nanoethics. The second, real-time regulation, is different; it is an attempt to capture the current temporal dilemma of nano-regulation in regulating neither “too early” nor “too late” in