Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology

Public policy with regard to nanotechnology has at times been curiously bifurcated. To a first approximation, policy for nano has been directed largely toward establishing interdisciplinary centers to aid university-industry cooperation in electronics and, increasingly, medicine. Policy debates about nanotechnology, on the other hand, have largely revolved around potential risks to health and the environment, and public perceptions of those risks. One of the first and most important institutions at the intersection of policy for and policy about nano is the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology (CBEN) at Rice University.

CBEN was the product of a convergence of two coalitions in the late 1990s, one local to Rice and one national in scope but located largely at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI). Two key figures mediated between these coalitions: Richard Smalley, the Nobel laureate chemist and codiscoverer of the buckyball; and Neal Lane, a physicist, former Rice provost and NSF director, then science advisor to President Bill Clinton. Over the course of his career, Smalley built up a large institutional base for nanotechnology at Rice, encompassing more than a quarter of the school's science and engineering faculty. He did so initially through his directorship of the Rice Quantum Institute, then by founding the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology (CNST) in the mid-1990s. Smalley's vision for what nanotechnology would be—a convergence of science and engineering and a catalyst for commercialization of academic research—clearly informed Lane's support for efforts to build a National Nanotechnology Initiative. In addition, Smalley had a large presence on the national science [Page 77]policy scene, and his CNST was taken as a model for the first round of Nanoscale Science and Engineering Centers funded by the NSF.

By the late 1990s, Smalley hoped to get NSF funding for a Center for Carbon Nanotechnology at Rice. This proposal was turned down, however, partly because reviewers felt it would take Smalley away from his research. So when two younger Rice faculty, Vicki Colvin and Mark Wiesner, presented a proposal to run a Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology, Smalley became its champion.