Too Little, Too Late? Research Policies on the Societal Implications of Nanotechnology in the United States

‘Nanotechnology’ is still in its infancy. Nevertheless, and despite ongoing disagreements about how ‘nanotechnology’ ought to be defined, narratives emerging from a diversity of sources share the notion that the societal impacts of nanotechnology could be transformational, perhaps radically so, in social realms as diverse as privacy, workforce, security, health, and human cognition. One consequence of this shared belief is a nascent effort to understand, anticipate, and perhaps manage the implications and dynamics of the societal impacts of nanotechnology. A rapidly expanding menu of conferences and reports, sponsored by governmental and non-governmental bodies in the US and Western Europe, attest to a growing concern about the societal effects of nanotechnology (e.g. Roco and Bainbridge, 2001; ETC, 2003; Meridian Institute, 2005; Wilsdon and Willis, 2004; Royal Society/Royal Academy of Engineering, 2004). In the US, a federal initiative to fund nanoscale science and engineering (NSE) research was accompanied at its inception in 2000 by a commitment to support a parallel, if substantially smaller, research effort on societal implications. Three years later, the US Congress actually passed legislation to mandate the expansion of this effort. In this paper we ask: what roles are the social sciences playing in the emerging co-evolution of nanotechnology and society, and, crucially, how do those roles come to be defined? To probe this question, we look to the US experience in constructing three brief narratives of our own to illustrate the evolution of: (1) NSE research; (2) speculations and concerns about the implications of nanotechnology; and (3) government commitment to supporting research on the societal implications of nanotechnology. Conspicuously absent from these stories is the influence of several decades of scholarship on the interactions of science, technology, and society. The community of science and technology studies (‘science studies’ hereafter) and science and technology policy scholars seem to have engaged with the challenges of nanotechnology only when stimulated by the Science as Culture Vol. 15, No. 4, 309–325, December 2006