Gen. Mod and Nano companies in trouble?

Steve Young wrote:

"sarp" wrote

July 27, 2006

Bio to Nano: Technology, Risk and Democracy

By John Hepburn

The scientific and business community are still struggling to
understand the global public rejection of genetically engineered (GE)
foods, and with the growing discourse around the risks and disruptive
impacts of nanotechnology, many are becoming increasingly worried that
history is about to repeat itself. There is a blossoming of reports and
conferences that explore 'From bio to nano' and how governments can
avoid 'fighting the last war'. PR consultancies and think-tanks are
doing a roaring trade in communications advice and 'upstream
engagement' tools to minimize the risk of backlash. However, it is
becoming clear that virtually all of the issues that have made GE food
so controversial are also present with nanotechnology. The only real
question that remains for executives and politicians worried about a
nano backlash is? when?

In some ways, the outrage over GE was the accumulated and unexpressed
outrage over the role of industrial agriculture and chemical companies
in our lives for the past fifty years. It was a gut-level reaction that
the industrial experiment had gone far enough. When pesticides were
first introduced, it was done with little or no knowledge by the
general public of the negative effects, and it was done when the modern
environmental and consumer movements had yet to develop. However, 40
years after Rachael Carson wrote 'Silent Spring', after 4 decades of
creeping revelations about the health and environmental impacts of
industrial agriculture, after 4 decades of increasing public skepticism
about the impacts of science, the public was not willing to idly accept
the next major technological experiment with the environment and with
their health.

Social movements don't spring out of nowhere. They emerge and grow
within a context - a mixture of culture, counter-culture, hopes, fears
and ideas. The dramatic rejection of GE foods in the mid-late 1990's
was a trigger event in a movement that started long before. The
groundwork was laid by the many groups who had been campaigning against
GE since the mid 1980's, so by the time Monsanto started planting
commercial GE crops in the US in 1996, there was a clear political,
social, intellectual and cultural context for the movement to flourish.
The public was recently attuned to the problems of industrial food
systems following BSE and other food/health scares, and was already
distrustful of chemical companies. The obvious and immediate question
over GE foods was, and still is, who benefits and who bears the risks?
The answer was obvious. So was the response.

The official debate about GE has largely been limited to a narrow
discussion of risk - involving an assessment of both the probability of
some negative event happening, and the magnitude of the consequences.
However, theorists such as Ulrich Beck have argued that the potential
consequences of new technologies such as nuclear fusion and
biotechnology render this traditional risk assessment approach
inadequate because of the new and potentially massive scale of the
consequences and the fact that, in the long run, the least likely event
will occur. But even this critique misses what has been one of the
primary sticking points for public acceptance of GE foods - the simple
fact that the people who create the risks are not necessarily the ones
who accept the consequences. Why should a person or a community accept
any level of risk whatsoever if there is no benefit for them? On the
otherhand, it is easy to see why companies are less concerned about
creating and imposing risks if they are not accountable for
consequences.

The mainstream debate on risk has flourished because it essentially
leaves the paradigm of technological development intact. The basic
assumption is that new technologies will be introduced unless a
relatively narrow scientific assessment indicates that there will be
negative impacts. This is in stark contrast to the model proposed by
many critics of GE who argue that the burden of proof should be
reversed - and that proponents of risky new technologies should be
required to prove safety prior to introduction of their products. There
is a rather compelling argument that both the probability of negative
effects of genetic engineering, and the scale of any negative
consequences are fundamentally unpredictable. Thereby justifying a
precautionary and enduring ban on the release of GE organisms into the
environment.

Despite the early stage of technology adoption, the debate about nano
risks is already quite well developed. This is probably due to a
combination of a number of factors, including a more active regulatory
and public/media context around risk following 10 years of relentless
public conflict over GE. The other factors are the similarities between
nanoparticle toxicity and the known toxicity of other ultra-fine
particles (vehicular emissions etc) and the doyen of public health
scandals - asbestos. However, issues of direct environmental and health
risks are only one small part of a bigger picture. The introduction of
transformative new technologies also raises more fundamental questions
about values and ideas about our future. The problem is that it has
somehow become taboo to contest ideas. It's as if industrial capitalism
is somehow not an idea and is therefore exempt from scrutiny, while
anything else can be dismissed as 'ideology' - a slur that implies a
lack of critical perspective. At this point, it is worth asking what
kind of society is it where anyone who raises criticisms of new
technology is immediately derided as an ideologue and a luddite? It's
almost as though science has achieved a quasi-religious status, where
bio and nanotech might well be regarded as the new creationism.

So what are the values that underpin the coming nanotechnology
revolution? To answer this question, we need to ask a few closely
related questions. Who is funding the technology? In whose interests is
it being developed? To what end? How are decisions being made about the
technology and by whom? The short answer is that nanotechnology is
primarily being developed by the world's largest corporations and by
the US military in order to introduce a range of new products and
processes either for the purposes of increasing profits or extending
military supremacy. While there are some genuinely interesting and
possibly beneficial applications of nanoscience, this is not where the
real action is and certainly isn't what is driving research agendas.

At a fundamental level, the debate over nanotechnology will be about
democracy. It will be about our future and who gets to define it. About
who benefits and who bears the negative impacts. That's what the GE
campaign is about, and that's what is at stake with nano. In the
absence of a cautious and responsible approach by governments and
industry to such a powerful set of technologies, the community is faced
with little choice but to put the brakes on - using whatever means are
possible.

What's to fear about fabrics that are nano-engineered to shed stain?
and for GE, how much distance is there really from today's hybridizing?
(it's only a scissors and duct tape away ))

You get me so moist when you talk like that.

Tonya Simpson wrote:
Steve Young wrote:

"sarp" wrote

July 27, 2006

Bio to Nano: Technology, Risk and Democracy

By John Hepburn

The scientific and business community are still struggling to
understand the global public rejection of genetically engineered (GE)
foods, and with the growing discourse around the risks and disruptive
impacts of nanotechnology, many are becoming increasingly worried that
history is about to repeat itself. There is a blossoming of reports and
conferences that explore 'From bio to nano' and how governments can
avoid 'fighting the last war'. PR consultancies and think-tanks are
doing a roaring trade in communications advice and 'upstream
engagement' tools to minimize the risk of backlash. However, it is
becoming clear that virtually all of the issues that have made GE food
so controversial are also present with nanotechnology. The only real
question that remains for executives and politicians worried about a
nano backlash is? when?

In some ways, the outrage over GE was the accumulated and unexpressed
outrage over the role of industrial agriculture and chemical companies
in our lives for the past fifty years. It was a gut-level reaction that
the industrial experiment had gone far enough. When pesticides were
first introduced, it was done with little or no knowledge by the
general public of the negative effects, and it was done when the modern
environmental and consumer movements had yet to develop. However, 40
years after Rachael Carson wrote 'Silent Spring', after 4 decades of
creeping revelations about the health and environmental impacts of
industrial agriculture, after 4 decades of increasing public skepticism
about the impacts of science, the public was not willing to idly accept
the next major technological experiment with the environment and with
their health.

Social movements don't spring out of nowhere. They emerge and grow
within a context - a mixture of culture, counter-culture, hopes, fears
and ideas. The dramatic rejection of GE foods in the mid-late 1990's
was a trigger event in a movement that started long before. The
groundwork was laid by the many groups who had been campaigning against
GE since the mid 1980's, so by the time Monsanto started planting
commercial GE crops in the US in 1996, there was a clear political,
social, intellectual and cultural context for the movement to flourish.
The public was recently attuned to the problems of industrial food
systems following BSE and other food/health scares, and was already
distrustful of chemical companies. The obvious and immediate question
over GE foods was, and still is, who benefits and who bears the risks?
The answer was obvious. So was the response.

The official debate about GE has largely been limited to a narrow
discussion of risk - involving an assessment of both the probability of
some negative event happening, and the magnitude of the consequences.
However, theorists such as Ulrich Beck have argued that the potential
consequences of new technologies such as nuclear fusion and
biotechnology render this traditional risk assessment approach
inadequate because of the new and potentially massive scale of the
consequences and the fact that, in the long run, the least likely event
will occur. But even this critique misses what has been one of the
primary sticking points for public acceptance of GE foods - the simple
fact that the people who create the risks are not necessarily the ones
who accept the consequences. Why should a person or a community accept
any level of risk whatsoever if there is no benefit for them? On the
otherhand, it is easy to see why companies are less concerned about
creating and imposing risks if they are not accountable for
consequences.

The mainstream debate on risk has flourished because it essentially
leaves the paradigm of technological development intact. The basic
assumption is that new technologies will be introduced unless a
relatively narrow scientific assessment indicates that there will be
negative impacts. This is in stark contrast to the model proposed by
many critics of GE who argue that the burden of proof should be
reversed - and that proponents of risky new technologies should be
required to prove safety prior to introduction of their products. There
is a rather compelling argument that both the probability of negative
effects of genetic engineering, and the scale of any negative
consequences are fundamentally unpredictable. Thereby justifying a
precautionary and enduring ban on the release of GE organisms into the
environment.

Despite the early stage of technology adoption, the debate about nano
risks is already quite well developed. This is probably due to a
combination of a number of factors, including a more active regulatory
and public/media context around risk following 10 years of relentless
public conflict over GE. The other factors are the similarities between
nanoparticle toxicity and the known toxicity of other ultra-fine
particles (vehicular emissions etc) and the doyen of public health
scandals - asbestos. However, issues of direct environmental and health
risks are only one small part of a bigger picture. The introduction of
transformative new technologies also raises more fundamental questions
about values and ideas about our future. The problem is that it has
somehow become taboo to contest ideas. It's as if industrial capitalism
is somehow not an idea and is therefore exempt from scrutiny, while
anything else can be dismissed as 'ideology' - a slur that implies a
lack of critical perspective. At this point, it is worth asking what
kind of society is it where anyone who raises criticisms of new
technology is immediately derided as an ideologue and a luddite? It's
almost as though science has achieved a quasi-religious status, where
bio and nanotech might well be regarded as the new creationism.

So what are the values that underpin the coming nanotechnology
revolution? To answer this question, we need to ask a few closely
related questions. Who is funding the technology? In whose interests is
it being developed? To what end? How are decisions being made about the
technology and by whom? The short answer is that nanotechnology is
primarily being developed by the world's largest corporations and by
the US military in order to introduce a range of new products and
processes either for the purposes of increasing profits or extending
military supremacy. While there are some genuinely interesting and
possibly beneficial applications of nanoscience, this is not where the
real action is and certainly isn't what is driving research agendas.

At a fundamental level, the debate over nanotechnology will be about
democracy. It will be about our future and who gets to define it. About
who benefits and who bears the negative impacts. That's what the GE
campaign is about, and that's what is at stake with nano. In the
absence of a cautious and responsible approach by governments and
industry to such a powerful set of technologies, the community is faced
with little choice but to put the brakes on - using whatever means are
possible.
What's to fear about fabrics that are nano-engineered to shed stain?
and for GE, how much distance is there really from today's hybridizing?
(it's only a scissors and duct tape away ))

You get me so moist when you talk like that.