Nanotechnology is an emerging range of technologies in which medicine and engineering meet physics and chemistry. Nanotechnology supporters claim that the machines and materials it may produce will mean faster computers, less pollution and cheaper energy, and longer and healthier lives.

Critics, however from Prince Charles to Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton fear that nanomachines could run amok and turn the surface of the Earth into an uninhabitable morass. Environmentalists also question the safety of nanoparticles.

The debate, like that on genetically modified food, is noisy but often uninformative. Before the technology has even emerged, the debate has largely become polarised into utopian and dystopian visions.

In a report published today (28th July 2003), a team at the University of Sheffield funded by the Economic and Social Research Council investigates the scientific reality behind nanotechnology, and looks at the hopes and the fears that it raises and provides a sober assessment of the possibilities that will help both sides of the debate.

The Social and Economic Challenges of Nanotechnology is the result of collaboration between a social scientist and a natural scientist: Professor Stephen Wood of the ESRC Centre of Innovation and Organisation (COI), and Professor Richard Jones of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, with Alison Geldart (COI), all at the University of Sheffield. It describes the emerging atom-by-atom science of nanotechnology and discusses the sweeping social and economic changes it might bring.

The word nanotechnology has been used to refer to everything from mundane, here and now applications, like stain-resistant trousers, to the most speculative extrapolations, such as self-replicating nano-robots. The report carefully distinguishes between what these technologies are delivering now, what may be possible in the future, and what is likely to remain beyond the bounds of feasibilit
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Contact: Anna Hinds
anna.hinds@esrc.ac.uk
01793-413122
Economic & Social Research Council
28-Jul-2003

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