International Council on Nanotechnology

Meeting the Public Halfway

In the first wave of National Science Foundation-funded Nanoscale Science and Engineering Centers, the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology (CBEN) at Rice University was the one most oriented to interaction with the wider public. CBEN was designed to maximize nanotechnology's positive impact on health and the environment partly through sustained, honest research on its potential risks. Communicating those risks to the wider public and to policy makers was intended to head off any backlash against overhyped claims for nano, and to foster responsible, transparent commercialization of nanoresearch.

As Chris Kelty, an anthropologist working with CBEN, puts it, though, “the public” as such has no secretary to call, and no e-mail address.” Thus, if CBEN wanted to disseminate its findings to the public, it would, in some sense, need to constitute that public itself. To do so, in 2005 it spun off the International Council on Nanotechnology (ICON), headed by CBEN's executive director, Kristen Kulinowski. ICON was built largely from a small industrial affiliates program that Kulinowski had already been operating for several years. This, in turn, shaped the flavor of ICON's early work. The largest company in the affiliates program, DuPont, had wanted to stimulate social science research on, for example, media coverage and public perception of nanotechnology. Thus, in transforming the affiliates program into ICON, social scientists, such as Kelty and Steve Currall at Rice and David Berube from the University of South Carolina, were included from the beginning.

Host, Honest Broker, Central Player

Over time, ICON evolved away from simply funding social science research and toward community building and dialogue among different types of stakeholders. Its early aim was to take the “social and ethical issues” rhetoric espoused at the National Nanotechnology Initiative and NSF and turn it into something concrete. In this role, ICON would have simply been an adjunct to the science going on in CBEN. However, it soon became clear to Kulinowski and Vicki Colvin, CBEN's director, that “social and ethical issues” encompassed something much wider than the biological and environmental scope of CBEN itself.

This realization stimulated a subtle but important restructuring. Kulinowski decided that ICON would not try to enact all the social and ethical issues of nanotechnology; instead, it would focus exclusively on the environmental health and safety dimensions of those issues, and serve as a neutral, honest broker for information, and a host convening various stakeholders. This would require ICON to be more autonomous from CBEN; at the same time, CBEN researchers would need to suffuse their own work with a “social and ethical issues” perspective, instead of simply outsourcing that work to ICON. For a time, ICON was perhaps the only organization trying to play this role, so it was able to attract a diverse array of member organizations. These included small start-ups eager for health and safety information about nanoparticles (both to be ready for potential public perception issues but also to safeguard their own employees)—such as Carbon Nanotechnologies, Inc. (now Unidym), a Houston start-up associated with Rick Smalley's laboratory at Rice. Large companies that had had brushes with the backlash against genetically modified organisms, such as DuPont and the insurance giant Swiss Re, also signed up. Government agencies such as EPA—at the state and federal level in the United States, and national bodies from countries such as Canada—saw ICON as a way to keep abreast of a fast-moving field as well as to receive input from constituents. Standards-setting bodies such as the International Standards Organization and ASTM International saw ICON as a potential clearinghouse for best practices for handling nanomaterials. And nongovernental organizations (NGOs), such as Consumers Union, affiliated with ICON in order to have a seat at the policy table. To handle the diverse interests of its members, ICON divided into four working groups: governance, knowledge base, best practices, and communications. This division acknowledges that very little is known about how one would go about determining the health and safety impacts of engineered nanomaterials; even less is known about those impacts themselves; and what little knowledge exists is often “known” only to small groups of practitioners, rather than to the wider community of relevant stakeholders.

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