Observations and Insights

Members of the NISE Net Program group and faculty and students at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University are teaming up to demonstrate and discuss potential collaborations between the social science community and the informal science education community at a conference of the Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies in Seattle in early September.

Some science fiction stories, like Michael Crichton’s novel Prey, portray nanotechnology as leading to developments that can destroy the world, but some of the presenters at this year’s International Nanotechnology Conference for Communication and Collaboration (INC5) told a story that was quite the opposite. The world, or at least humanity, is already on a path toward destruction and nanotechnology may be the only hope to save it.

While nano may be about things on a very tiny scale – around 10-9 meters, there is nothing small about the government’s investment in nanoscale research -- it’s now around 10+9 dollars.

“The Network is going to grow. I don’t think you can stop it or control it even if you wanted to.” So said, Cal Tech nano researcher Mamadou Diallo, a member of the NISE Net’s NSF review panel at a meeting about nano education at the University of Southern California on April 27. Didn’t Michael Crichton predict a similar thing in his novel Prey? NISE Net Program Manager Vrylena Olney saw the similarity.