Bainbridge, William

William Sims Bainbridge (1940–) is an American sociologist of science, religion, and popular culture and the program director for Human-Centered Computing at the National Science Foundation (NSF). One of the leading advocates of nanotechnology in the United States, Bainbridge has published extensively on the subject of converging technologies and society. Along with National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) Director Mi-hail Roco, he has coedited six widely cited publications on societal implications of nanotechnology.

Bainbridge received his B.A. in sociology from Boston University in 1971 and his Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University in 1975. Between 1975 and 1992, he was a tenured professor of sociology at University of Washington, Harvard University, Illinois State University, and Towson University. From 1992, he worked for NSF in a variety of capacities, including science officer and senior science advisor for the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences, and program director for the Sociology Program, Innovation and Organizational Change Program, the Human-Computer Interaction Program, the Knowledge and Cognitive Systems Program, the Science and Engineering Information Integration and Informatics Program, and the Social Informatics Program. He also served as deputy director of the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems at NSF. In 2006, he became codirector the Human-Centered Computing cluster within the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems at NSF. He is active in the scholarly community, reviewing manuscripts for social science journals and academic book publishers and research proposals for foundations such as National Endowment for the Humanities and National Science Foundation.

Bainbridge's research areas include religion, science and technology, and virtual reality, and he has published extensively on relationships among the three areas. He is the author of more than 200 articles, book chapters, and essays, and wrote 17 books on science, religion, and culture. In the early 1970s, Bainbridge conducted research on the sociology of religion and cults, gaining access to the Children of God, a religious group in California, and joined a satanic cult in Massachusetts as part of his ethnographic research. Religion continues to be a prominent theme in his research on the sociology of science and technology. For example, he has expressed his concerns that religious opposition will thwart what he terms immortality technologies because such technologies would effectively end the need for religion, and thus be perceived as a threat by religious organizations.

Bainbridge's ideas about what he calls nanoconvergence are a central theme in the six reports that he has [Page 42]coedited with Mihail Roco and the eponymous subject of his 2007 book. These ideas have been criticized by some science studies scholars as presenting the implications of emerging technologies in exclusively enthusiastic terms, and failing to acknowledge the complex ethical questions they raise. For example, Joachim Schummer argues that the language of convergence used in Bainbridge and Roco's 2001 and 2003 reports on social and ethical implications of nanotechnologies obscures underlying goals of human enhancement and presents these goals as those of society rather than special interests, such as military. By doing so, Schummer suggests, Bainbridge and Roco frame controversial and unrealized applications of nanotechnology as factual, and avoid substantive and broad public debate on values, norms and goals associated with emerging science and technology.

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