So, it's the end of what's been a pretty full on week for the SAFENANO team, and i'm confused! Not really a suprise or a change from the norm i guess, but this time i thought i'd write it down and see if SAFENANO's readers can offer any help!...
To provide you with some context, here's the background to why my head's spinning...
This week, myself and Rob Aitken attended 1st Annual Symposium of the EU FP7 project ObservatoryNANO in Dusseldorf, within which we lead the Environment, Health and Safety work package. The meeting itself was open only to invited experts from across the wide range of ObservatoryNANO's 10 main technological themes, so there was plenty of room for at times heated debate amongst a group of scientists with such varied backgrounds and strong ideas - I was really looking forward to it 
.
This year, the general idea of the symposium was to provide some plenary sessions covering broad ranging aspects of nano (such as our EHS perspective, and tackling application development within industry), and the rest of the time be split into parallel workshops for discussion of major themes within the project. As one of our main deliverables within the EHS workpackage is to evaluate the (soon to be publically available) year 1 technology sector reports (a hefty task as there are currently over 50!!), myself and the other workpackage members from RIVM, EMPA and CEA split up and tried to gather opinion on the EHS aspects of as many of the workshops as possible.
Anyway, i'm getting sidetracked - enough about work tactics & back to why i'm confused...
As part of the symposium, members of our fellow workpackage on Ethics and Societal implications of nanotechnologies held a number of workshops to assist them in pulling together an 'Ethics Toolkit', which (to the best of my understanding) will aim to help provide those working within nanotechnologies with guidance on practising in an ethically sound manner. On the afternoon of the first day, i found myself settling into the Food, Health and the Environment Ethics workshop - not quite sure what to expect.
The session started with an introduction from the session's mediator, who then started to outline some ethical questions for the group to consider. As could be expected, the reception to these was a mixed one - some engaging with the questions, and others totally rejecting their value or relevance to the day's proceedings (at one point a hand was raised simply to comment that the whole thing was all utterly rediculous...like i say, strong opinions). It all made for good listening.
However, as time went on and we'd waded through the ins and outs of general ethical soundness, the oxymoron of green nanotechnology and bizarelley, whether or not it was fair to implant chips in teachers' brains to monitor whether or not they were having 'inappropriate' thoughts during school hours (!), the crux of the whole nano-ethics debate for me crystallised, and then remained unanswered: is it fair to consider the ethics of nanotechnology separately from the techology or application which it is enables?
So, here are the main arguments i've been thinking about:
1. Without the specific context/application of use by which the nano and application/technology are married, there would be no real ethical issue to consider (as there would be no exposure to and thus implications for animal or environmental wellbeing) - so why bother to consider nano-ethics separately? i.e. all we'd be doing is regurgitating the same ethical questions we've already thrashed out for say biotech to a greater extent...
2. To only consider the nanotech and the technology/application it supports together is also short-sighted, as although they are married by the context/application in which they are used, and thus you could possibly combine the ethical questions posed by each into one larger set of questions, the two continue to evolve and progress separately of each other and this changing nature has to be taken into account in some way.
3. Am i just thinking waaay to hard about this on a week where i've had very little sleep?!
Really, the more i think about this the more confused i get (and the happer it get I'm in EHS not ethics!). I'm certain there are flaws in even these basic arguments, and many others i haven't even thought of yet but despite putting a considerable amount of thought into it, i still can't see a clear way forward...
So, given that i'm not making any progress - what do you think?
Can nano- be separated from -technology, or are the two stuck together whether we'd like them to be or not? Your thoughts please!