Nanotechnology and the Negotiation of Novelty

Much of the hype around nanotechnology relies on the notion that it is novel and revolutionary. A large part of that in turn relies on the purportedly revolu- tionary ability of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope to manipulate individual at- oms. However, novelty always involves a comparison of similarity and difference with what came before. Furthermore, the novelty of the STM was negotiated and re- negotiated from the very beginning - just as the nature of nanotechnology continues to be negotiated to this day. The history of the STM sheds light on the role of prom- ise and hype in science in general and directs our attention towards science in the public sphere. 1. The Etymology of Nano In our culture, the negotiation of novelty is commonplace. Patenting, for example, is a process to decide what counts as novel. Innovations are compared against predecessors and consequential decisions are made on the basis of similarity and difference. The same is true of the Nobel Prizes. One might even argue that all arguments can be recast as a negotiation of similarity and difference. Nanoscience and nanotechnology are often claimed to be novel and also often claimed to not be so. In this paper I want to outline the history of nano with respect to the ongoing negotiation of its novelty. The Oxford English Dictionary is a useful first port of call for this kind of endeavor: The first use of the word was already in 1974 but in an ob- scure publication, the Proceedings of the International Conference of Production Engi- neers. The second recorded use is Eric Drexler's 1986 Engines of Creation, and that is of course the most important locus because this book was widely read. After 1986, one can see the word spread to publications with large readerships: The New Scientist, the Times Higher Education Supplement, the Washington Post, the Sunday Times, and Nature. Drexler's Engines of Creation is a tremendously successful book, written in an upbeat tone of voice painting a rosy future of tremendous technological ability. Drexler argued that we can now build structures on the nanoscale, meaning that we can move and combine at- oms and molecules as we do with Lego™-blocks, as long as the resultant molecules are energetically stable. We can build molecules that have similar functions as the DNA-RNA- protein system found in nature, that is to say our new molecules may be engineered so as to be parts of a self-reproducing system. From this will flow new materials, new drugs, new information technologies, new human tissues, new just about everything. In the introduc- tion to the book, Marvin Minsky, Professor at MIT (and so a credible individual in matters technical), emphasized that Drexler's vision was not fanciful but based on a thorough knowledge of the current science and technology. The vision was compelling for two rea- sons. 1) The tool for moving individual atoms, the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), became well-known at just this time - it received the Nobel Prize in the same year that En- gines of Creation was published (1986). 2) The combination of molecular biology, the in-