Codes of Conduct, Corporate

The withdrawal of the state from many regulatory roles in the 1990s combined with the predominance of the private sector in nanotechnology research has led to concerns regarding the role of powerful corporations in nanotechnology research. Another issue of concern is that many of the corporations that are actively enrolled in nanotechnology research, such as Monsanto, have extremely poor records when it comes to safety for the environment or other issues of concern. Since nanotechnology is seen as the next frontier of research and the next industrial revolution, the concerns that are raised by such a massive intrusion into the current ecosystem are of a quantitatively greater magnitude.

At the heart of this concern is the current legal practice that gives corporations the status of an individual, but do not expect a corresponding set of duties. The 2010 U.S. Supreme Court judgment of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which ruled that limits could not be set regarding the use of corporate money for campaign advertising, and ruling that corporations should be treated the same as an individual and are therefore entitled to the rights of individuals, underscored this dramatically. Unlike labor law, corporate codes of conduct do not have any authorized definition. The term corporate code of conduct refers to companies' policy statements that define ethical standards for their conduct. Not only is there great variance, but all codes are completely voluntary, and address issues in a wide range, from workers rights to the ethical mission statement of a corporation.

The nature of nanotechnology research, involving intense investment by both the state and the private sector, has also raised issues of concentrations of power and control. A lion's share of the billions of dollars being invested in nanotechnology is generated by the world's most powerful governments (led by the United States, the European Union, and Japan) and the wealthiest corporations (including IBM, DuPont, Syngenta, Exxon, Pfizer, L'Oréal, and Kraft). Critics argue that with its immense potential for both transformation and control, unregulated nanotechnology can create hitherto unimagined corporate concentration and new atomic-scale monopolies over life and matter. These include smaller and faster computers; drugs that permeate the body more effectively and can target specific cells; catalysts, used to speed up chemical reactions, including oil-refining processes, that can be made more reactive; or sensors that can monitor with much greater precision. Issues have also been raised regarding the ruthlessly competitive nature of the new technology that may stifle innovation through extremely powerful intellectual property laws.

A wide range of issues are not fully addressed by current corporate codes of conduct, which tend to focus on areas where anticorporate activism has already made strong inroads, such as worker conditions, or environmental issues, such as gloal warming. These include forms of nanotoxicity, economic disruption caused by nanocom-modities, ethical issues of nanoenabled human enhancement, and privacy issues that concern surveillance from nanoenabled sensors. The issue is all the more pressing in the absence of any extant regulatory framework to adequately deal with nanotechnology, and an almost complete dependence on corporate ethical standards.

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