IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Spring 2014 - 10

BOOK REVIEW

KARL D. STEPHAN

Nanotechnology: Ethical
and Social Implications
by Ahmed S. Khan. CRC Press (Taylor & Francis), 2012.

nyone who doesn't know by now what the
prefix nano- means, just hasn't been paying attention. Especially for those involved
in the technical end of engineering and
science, nanotechnology - dealing with objects
ranging in size from about 1 to 100 billionths of a
meter (nanometers, or 10 -9 meters) - has been the
buzzword par excellence for the last decade or so.
Although enough time has passed to take some of the
shine off the golden nanotech future that the field's
early promoters promised, institutional forces such as
the U.S. government's National Nanotechnology Initiative continue to bring nano-things to our attention.
Nature - or God, depending on your point of
view - knew about nanotechnology long before
humans could either learn about or manipulate matter
with nano-scale dimensions. DNA is the best example of a naturally occurring nano-scale molecule that
performs incredibly intricate functions, and scientists
discover more natural nano-wonders every year.
Some researchers point to Michael Faraday's
experiments with colloidal gold in 1847 as the first
time anyone realized that the properties of a bulk
material - shiny yellowness, in the case of gold -
could change radically if it was divided into minute
particles. Colloidal gold - nanoparticles of gold,
essentially - shows various beautiful shades of red
in water suspension or when added to certain types
of glassware, as some 17th-century Italian glassmakers knew how to do. Others say that the founding
prophet of nanotechnology was Richard P. Feynman, the Nobelist who gave a famous 1959 speech
entitled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," in
which he called for research efforts to exploit the
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2014.2301861
Date of publication: 10 March 2014

information-storage and other valuable properties of
nano-scale structures. It was in that same year that
Texas Instruments researcher Jack Kilby applied for
a patent on the integrated circuit, which now in the
form of computer chips routinely employs transistor
gates only a few nanometers long. There are probably
more transistors in the world than any other type of
man-made object, so it is no longer accurate to say
that nanotechnology artifacts are rare or exotic. Every
computer chip has thousands to billions of them.
The same kinds of technology that enable us to put
billions of transistors on a single chip have led to the
ability to make increasingly complex nanostructures
for a wide variety of other uses, ranging from electronics to chemistry and medicine. From a political
point of view, the U.S. Nanotechnology Initiative is
unusual in that every year, a certain portion (usually
between one and two percent) of the funds expended
on the field have been set aside explicitly for studies
and other work pertaining to the ethical and social
aspects of nanotechnology. According to the nano.gov
website, in fiscal year 2013 about $34 million will be
devoted to such high-minded activities. While that
amount of money doesn't buy you a lot of integratedcircuit fabrication equipment, for example, it will go
a long way if you spend it on philosophers, historians,
and policy experts whose biggest expenses tend to be
plane tickets. The result has been a veritable flood of
papers, seminars, and books on the social and ethical
aspects of nanotechnology, of which the book under
review here is one.
Nanotechnology: Social and Ethical Implications
is a compendium of papers edited by Ahmed S. Khan,
an educator and researcher at DeVry University in
Addison, IL, U.S.A. DeVry University, whose presence now is mainly but not exclusively online, is a
descendant of the former DeVry Technical Institute,
IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

SPRING 2014

http://www.nano.gov

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