Foppall og NANOTEK

Vyrde Lesar.

I Sarpsborg krangles det om foppall i fopallavisa SA. AT DØM GIDDER. Vi skal derfor heller konsentrere oss om Nanoteknologi. Ordføreren og Rådmannen har jo vært i samarbeidsbyen vårres i Ammerika. (Det er ente like greit å sammarbeide med Moss, ente like morro heller !!).

Nanotech Policy: Regulation at the Intersection of Science, Morals and Public Health
By Bart Mongoven

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released a consultant's report Oct. 16 that offered the first plan for studying the toxicity of nanotechnology. The report outlined three elements of a toxicity screening strategy, which is crucial for the agency as it develops a regulatory approach for the technology within the bounds of the national Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) -- a law passed in 1977 to regulate chemical compounds in commerce.

It is easy -- indeed, tantalizingly so -- to imagine the future of public policy with a structure identical to that known today, differing only in the issues to which it reacts. For example, it is tempting to rely on our familiarity with the players, interests and arguments involved in the perennial debate over fuel economy standards to imagine similar debates in 50 years that involve the minimum hydrogen fuel required for passenger cars to fly 50 miles at 1,000 feet in inclement weather. But public policy -- and the emerging technologies that often drive it -- is too dynamic to be extrapolated from current trends. People have been predicting flying cars for a long time, but who could have foreseen in 1970 that much of the need for them would be obviated by an explosion in Internet telecommuting? Policy architects have been required to address not speed limits for flying cars, but regulatory barriers to broadband Internet deployment.

The point is, the introduction of new technologies increasingly is confounding existing legal structures. The impulse to regulate through existing structures can be clearly seen where nanotechnology is concerned -- but at the same time, policymakers, lawyers and industry admit they are finding it increasingly difficult to apply the old regulatory systems to new techniques and concepts, such as stem cell research, cloning and the Internet.

In each of these cases, advanced democracies are trying to figure out how best to encourage continued technological development and progress while also managing risks and ensuring the ethical and social demands of their publics are met. These growing challenges concerning regulation of new technologies illuminate some of the fundamental questions that policymakers have not yet asked.

Nanotechnology presents one of the more complicated emerging regulatory challenges, raising questions about both safety and side effects.

The term "nanotechnology" refers to any number of products that depend on the precise formation of extremely small components -- 1 to 100 nanometers. Dozens of nanotechnology products are already on the market, in products including such things as antibacterial wound dressings, dental adhesives, and even in fashion, but these represent a minute fraction of the commercial applications nanotech will find in the coming decade.

Leading the parade of promising new nanotechnologies are carbon nanotubes, which allow for the formation of small, strong devices that can be used for countless applications. Somewhere in the future lies the development of self-assembling or self-replicating nanotechnologies. These conceivably could have such wonderful applications as being inserted as agents into the human bloodstream to help combat the effects of disease and aging. On the other hand, nightmare scenarios about self-replicating machinery have been the stuff of science fiction for decades, and the fear of a world consumed by uncontrollable self-replicating nanites has an understood name: "gray goo."

Acknowledging the fears of the "gray goo" and other more realistic potential problems, the nanotechnology industry is working with government to find a satisfactory regulatory regime. Business wants some form of regulation because, as the "gray goo" scenario suggests, the most provocative rationale for regulating nanotechnology is direct safety risk, and the industry knows that significant allegations of harm from nanotech products could stifle the future of the industry as a whole. What industry and the government are trying to develop is a regime that will prevent the "gray goo" while allowing for nanotechnology to flourish under the eye of a watchful, though non-intrusive, government.

However, regulatory history suggests that many of these goals are nearly contradictory: Creative technological industries generally do not flourish when tightly regulated. Technology excels when people and groups are allowed to do whatever they want, barring specific prohibitions. Because regulators cannot predict invention and innovation, progress stalls under systems in which the creative are allowed to do only those things the government enumerates that they can.

The scientists involved in nanotechnology are trying to find a place for their work under current regulations. For the most part, they have turned to TSCA law, which contains a number of registration requirements for chemicals and mandates testing under certain circumstances. Despite some inevitable legal gymnastics, TSCA seems like the proper place for nanotechnology to be regulated -- if we are to remain within our current public policy framework. It allows for great freedom in experimentation and research, but places testing requirements on substances that are produced in bulk and used in commerce. It allows for both innovation and restriction in the event a problem is discovered.

Below the surface, however, some significant problems emerge. With nanotechnology, chemical compositions may remain the same, but how they act in the body can change. This places significant stress, for instance, on assertions that carbon nanotubes are safe because their components have been found safe in certain applications. Researchers have found that one application of carbon nanotubes -- called buckeyballs -- can pass through the blood-brain barrier, something very few manmade substances can do. While there is significant question about whether this has meaningful health effects, it is generally a cause for concern. Further, it remains unclear whether TSCA's rules would apply to buckeyballs if carbon nanotubes themselves have been shown to be safe.

Some look at stories like the buckeyball and "gray goo" scenarios and call for a complete moratorium on nanotechnology development. Some call for the moratorium to last until a new regulatory regime has been put in place, others for nanotech to be put on hold until large-scale health studies have been conducted.

Any of these moratoriums would address most health concerns but, as the debate over cloning and the use of fetal stem cells shows, it is unrealistic to imagine that U.S. regulations can contain an emerging technology. Research will continue -- the only questions are where, and under what rules (if any). As the U.S. experience with stem cells shows, the country that bans certain scientific research only loses control over how that research is carried out, and stands to lose out on any competitive advantages the new development brings.

The issue of human cloning could be particularly enlightening. While fully recognizing that they may be giving up significant learning and technological advantages, the United States, Europe Union, Japan and most other developed countries have nonetheless decided to completely disallow human cloning. This may halt efforts to clone humans in these countries, but it will not stop cloning altogether -- and most experts agree that while it is far more difficult than cloning a sheep, cloning of humans is only a matter of time.

So we're left with an interesting situation: The negative effects of someone creating a human clone are both moral and theoretical. Despite bans, human clones are likely to be created, and it is difficult to imagine how human cloning will directly harm people or damage property. By almost all accounts, however, the inevitability of human cloning does not sway people from supporting laws that ban the practice where they live. It is considered offensive.

Similarly, fetal stem cell research is highly controversial, and the U.S. response to this question has become the center of a difficult political debate. U.S. policy, preventing the use of new stem cell lines in the country, reflects the recommendations of a controversial panel composed of scientists and ethicists that was assembled to chart that ground where science is at question but does not provide a guide -- and the current U.S. stem-cell policy reflects what that group claims is the best answer available.

Stem cells and human cloning intersect where regulation and morality meet. Does nanotechnology, however, rise to this level? For most, the answer is that it does not -- that no fundamental moral principles are at stake, and that that nanotech merely rises to a level at which we use risk assessments to determine whether buckeyballs pose an unacceptable risk to human health.

Establishing that the public is willing to regulate certain commercial technological activities on moral grounds, then, opens whole new lines of discussion: Is it moral, for example, that Harvard University owns a patent on a kind of mouse that it created using genetic manipulation? Should regulation of "life patents" fall under cautious moral questioning, or should it fall to risk assessments?

The ethical implications of "life patents" were among the concerns expressed by biotechnology's opponents in the 1990s, but generally those questions were overwhelmed by tactical concerns.

In the 1990s, opponents of biotechnology embarked on a strategy to rouse public concern about biotechnology's safety and its moral implications. Though most opponents objected to the use of biotechnology in agriculture for complex ideological reasons, they focused their rhetoric on the safety of the products as food and in the environment; concerns about the social implications for developing countries; and concerns about the economic impact of agricultural biotechnology on farmers (particularly in developing countries) and the agricultural economy in general. These messages were critical, opponents thought, because they broadened the anti-biotechnology message beyond a narrow ideology and brought it to a variety of constituencies -- e.g. farm groups, environmentalists, human rights advocates. Importantly, the tactic worked in Europe to stall the growth of agricultural biotechnology.

The tactical decisions that biotechnology's opponents made in the 1990s are having an important effect on the nanotechnology debate today. Opponents of biotechnology focused on three basic, easily identifiable concerns, rather than expressing their central argument. Most, if pressed, would argue not about the safety of GMOs, but rather that this under-regulated new industry was moving too fast and that the technology in question required time and study in a holistic manner. Biotechnology's supporters, on the other hand, pulled the three apart and successfully have dispatched each.

Biotechnology's opponents only rarely articulated their fundamental argument -- and did so primarily at U.N.-sponsored events. As a result, now that the nanotechnology debate has begun, none of the groundwork that could have been laid a decade ago is there. Those pressing for the most dramatic restrictions on nanotechnology are beginning to make fundamental arguments, rather than tactical ones.

The most ambitious attempt to make fundamental changes in the structure that regulates new technologies is being offered by ETC Group, which is calling for an international convention on the public's right to accept or decline new technology -- the International Convention on the Evaluation of New Technologies. This step, which essentially calls for the politicization of scientific and technological progress, has long been an objective of anti-chemicals and anti-biotechnology advocates. Some of these advocates have relied on a radical interpretation of the precautionary principle, which argues simply that a new product should be "proven safe" before it is allowed on the market. Taken to its logical extreme, of course, this would stifle all new technology by demanding that creators prove a negative (that it is not possible for their products to be harmful). This clearly being the case, the only way to certify that the negative "no harm" has been achieved would be to turn to political judgments, rather than scientific ones.

Despite the advocacy of the ETC Group and its allies, movement toward International Convention on the Evaluation of New Technologies will be slow, if it comes at all. However, what is emerging is growing recognition that the regulation of science and technology may require fundamental changes that outpace regulatory structures, such as TSCA or the nascent European chemicals regulatory scheme.

What industrialized countries appear to be waiting for is a new way of looking at the intersection of technological and moral issues. It is less and less frequent that the old ways provide adequate answers to the legal, moral and ethical questions now being posed, but a new way has not yet been found.