Diary – 10 May 2003

I found myself twice debating with Ottilia Saxl, director of the Institute of Nanotechnology, on the radio last week. She assured listeners that I was quite wrong to imply that big business was behind the technology. Governments, she soothed, not corporations, are providing the grants. So what? Governments make bad decisions every day, and most of their grants constitute subsidies to big business in any case. But it’s not true. This year alone, multinationals, including arms manufacturers, have already invested more than $1 billion in nanotechnology. Bill Joy, chief scientist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems and top of America’s technological pecking order, told the Ecologist magazine recently, ‘We are opening Pandora’s most terrifying box, yet people have barely begun to take notice. We are designing technologies that might literally consume ecosystems.’ If that is the message of countless nano-experts, it doesn’t seem extravagant to ask for a pause while we assess the potential dangers of a technology that makes genetic engineering look as though it belongs in the Stone Age.