ABSTRACT
Science is distinguished as “the process, or the group of inter-related processes, through which we have acquired our modern, ever-changing knowledge of the natural world which encompasses inanimate nature, life, human nature, and human society” (Richter, 1972, p. 1). Closely related to science is technology wherein the emphasis moves from discovery to application. Richter distinguished the two by their relation to nature, where science accepts and even seeks a clear sense of nature’s control over humans, and technology wrestles to release humans from the limitations placed on them by nature and seeks ultimately to control it. These distinctions fade in nanoscale science and engineering, which together are pursuing the study, control, manipulation, and assembly of multifarious nanoscale components into materials, systems, and devices to serve human interests and needs. At the meeting of the American Physical Society held at Caltech on December 29, 1959 Feynman (1959) spoke about an “expansive yet undiscovered world which exists beyond the reach of our hands and eyes, but that would soon come within reach of science.” He said:
What about this notion of manipulating and controlling the material universe? The idea that nature is to be mastered, managed, and used for the benefit of human life was expounded by Francis Bacon, the recognized father of the modern research institute and founder of the inductive method of scientific inquiry. Merchant (1980) explained that “Bacon fashioned a new ethic sanctioning the exploitation of nature” (p. 170). What were once constraints against searching too deeply into God’s secrets about the world, Bacon turned into sanctions to “stretch to their promised bounds” the “narrow limits of man’s dominion over the universe” (p. 180). Bacon wrote in his New Atlantis about scientists as fathers and high priests, who had the “power of absolving all human misery through science.” Merchant elucidated Bacon’s treatise explaining:
Merchant explained further how Bacon’s mechanistic utopia meshed completely with mechanical philosophy of the 17th century, a reconstruction of the prevailing cultural awareness that reduced nature to passive, inert atomic particles. His new ideology shifted the dominant paradigm away from sanction against tampering with nature to an ideology that sanctioned and even encouraged the control and dissection of nature through experiment. Centuries later, nanotechnology researchers such as Carroll embrace the ideology of mastery over all of matter, living and inert:
CARROLL: It’s useful to imagine being able to engineer things on the molecular and cellular scale. That presents all sorts of exciting possibilities in
terms of being able to do research on kinds of disease mechanisms and disease progression. But I think the idea that we are ever going to have individualized little nanobots or something like that running around and doing things semi-autonomously in living humans, is a long way off. I wouldn’t want to be on the FDA panel that passed judgment on products coming onto the marketplace and having inanimate objects making decisions inside of your body, other than at the level of “your insulin level is low, please add insulin.” For things that are fairly automatically easy to check (simple kinds of replication of mechanical functions), I think will be a huge market for diabetes, cancer, and various chronic disease management. There are some real opportunities there to take diseases that formerly were fatal and put them into the category of manageable. I think that understanding things on the nanoscale will help that process. So, those are the things that I look toward-gaining insight and understanding and increasing the kind of toolkit for being able to do relatively simple tasks in an easier and more cost-effective basis.
