History-in-the-Making

The History-in-the-Making project, started in 2006, attempts to understand the history of nanotechnology as it emerges. The project, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is handled by a research group based at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Heading the project is W. Patrick McCray, Co-director of the center and Associate Professor in the UCSB Department of History. The center is collaborating with the Kimberly Jenkins Chair for New Technologies and Society at Duke University (Timothy Lenoir), and the Center for Contemporary History and Policy at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia (Cyrus Mody). The goal of the project is to make policy makers, scientists and engineers, and the general public understand the opportunities and the risks that the nanoenterprise affords.

The wide range of possible applications makes the understanding of the development and its impact on society a complex task. New technologies do not enter society on their own; ultimately people and societies make technologies and decide how they are used. The History-in-the-Making concept focuses on the historical and social developments around this purely technological area. It acknowledges that social sciences and humanities have significant roles to play in nanotechnology beyond addressing the issues of public perception and media coverage.

One problem that needs to be addressed is that scientists and engineers do not have the time, expertise, or resources to survey the influence their research has on the markets and society. They also have little information of how their research results are implemented and commercialized. Historians, social scientists and humanities scholars have the insights and methods that can help to monitor and document the impact of nanotechnology on society as “history in the making.”

One problem the project will have to deal with is the growing amount of information that in combination with the limited ability of the human mind to process data leads to a collective memory loss (stored to forget). A proper documentation and structuring of the events will have to be established to help future historians extract the actual chain of events out of the huge amounts of raw data stored. Otherwise, electronic mail, Websites, conversations, and experiments about the emerging field of nanotechnology might quickly slip into the past.

[Page 316]This is especially problematic, as the public perception of nanotechnology does not reflect its importance. For example, government support for nanotechnology—some $6.5-billion thus far—is on a similar scale as the U.S. space program was in the early 1960s, when a large infrastructure for science and technology was established. But public awareness of nanotechnology is low. People are accustomed to innovation and the importance of this technological revolution might be underestimated.

A key project of the center is the historical context of nanotechnology. A first step was a case study focusing on the nascent field of Spintronics, basing on interviews with participants of a research conference in 2006 on the topic at UCSB's Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. The work is directed toward understanding the development of nanoelectronics, temporally and spatially, and includes aspects such as research funding, patents, publications, and research groups. In this context, the team of Duke University applied tools they had developed for data mapping and visualization.

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