Big Debate Over Small Science

Feb. 27, 2008 — -- If scientists could produce a tiny robot that could travel through your body and heal damaged tissue, eradicate disease-carrying microbes, and even wipe out a cancerous tumor, would you support their efforts?

Maybe not, especially if you are an American. Skepticism of experimental science is rampant, and scholars across the land are struggling to understand why, and what they can do to change attitudes. Studies sponsored by the National Science Foundation have found a widespread suspicion among the public that too many scientists are trying to "play God" by manipulating life, and that the government is inept when it comes to protecting its people.

Yet those same studies show that the vast majority of people believe science has enriched their lives, and will continue to do so.

It's not hard to see why so many have conflicting views of science. We've been burned too many times by pharmaceutical drugs that were found to do more harm than good, after millions had already used them. Biotechnology promises to ease our suffering, but many fear the real goal is to create super-humans, and super-warriors. Evolution, which few in the academic world doubt, has alienated millions because they fear it undermines their religion.

And now we are plunging into a new frontier that the director of the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies calls "science's next big thing" – nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is the science of the very small, controlling matter one atom at a time, where the laws of physics enter a strange new world. This is a field that is so new, and so poorly understood by the public, that researchers must first define it for participants in their surveys before they can ask their opinions. And many, it turns out, are less than enchanted.

In one recent study of attitudes in the United States and Europe, only 29.5 percent of 1,015 adult Americans said they found nanotechnology "morally acceptable." If that really is typical of the whole population, then far more Americans find nanotechnology morally unacceptable than participants in France, where 72.1 percent found it acceptable, and other European countries.