Abstract
There is a rapidly expanding field of research on social and ethical interactions with nano-scaled sciences and technologies. An important question is: What does social and ethical research actually mean when it is focussed on technological applications that are largely hypothetical, and a field of science spread out across multiple disciplines and lacking unification? This paper maps early literature in the field of research as a way of answering this question. Our aim is to describe how this field is developing in response to its difficult task, and particularly, to comment on the topics of focus and where there is potential for future development. We present four topical categories, labelled Governance, Perception, Science and Philosophy, and use these as a tool to both map the field and to analyse its development. We find a majority of literature currently focused on issues of governance and perception, and offer suggestions for why this might be so. We then discuss cross-category themes of definition, novelty and interdisciplinarity, highlighting diverse positions and a problematic lack of direct debate. Our conclusion is that the field would benefit from more interaction, cross-referencing and creative research across traditional fields of inquiry.
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Notes
Of course one could alternatively ask why there were so few documents (13%) in 2005. In our opinion this is harder to find reasons for, although it might be argued that it is simply a consequence of saturation in 2004.
It is possible to argue, as Grunwald [38] does, that a ‘new ethics’ is needed in order to deal with the ethical aspects of nanotechnology, even though neither the technology nor the ethical questions are new. For example, when it is felt that the ‘ethics’ we have, did not deal well enough with past technological developments.
An interesting point to note here is the question of whether individual researchers can be interdisciplinary. We believe that while they certainly can be (by drawing on and integrating work from across a range of different disciplines), the immense challenges of this task and the traditional organisation of higher educational institutions according to disciplinary specialist streams makes this unlikely to be widespread and possibly difficult to detect. For the ease of our analysis here, we excluded the possibility of individual authors working in interdisciplinary ways, as did Schummer [92].
Schummer [93] has suggested that the lack of interdisciplinarity stems from the definition of nano S&T being too vague, and the fact that diverging visions of the future of the technology are being generated by different paradigms. From general literature on integrative research, we can also say that there are a number of challenges inhibiting the practice of interdisciplinarity; factors such as the difficulty of communicating across disciplines, the extended time periods required, and the power politics emerging during collaborative processes [16, 41, 78].
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Acknowledgements
We wish to thank the participants at our two Bergen workshops for invaluable motivation, useful comment and critique. We are particularly grateful to Prof. Roger Strand for providing insights and inspiration throughout the research project. Part of this research has been funded by the Norwegian Research Council’s program NANOMAT, and we are especially grateful for this support.
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Kjølberg, K., Wickson, F. Social and Ethical Interactions with Nano: Mapping the Early Literature. Nanoethics 1, 89–104 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-007-0011-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-007-0011-x