Tag Archives: Center for Nanotechnology in Society (CNS)

Brain research, ethics, and nanotechnology (part one of five)

This post kicks off a series titled ‘Brains, prostheses, nanotechnology, and human enhancement’ which brings together a number of developments in the worlds of neuroscience*, prosthetics, and, incidentally, nanotechnology in the field of interest called human enhancement. Parts one through four are an attempt to draw together a number of new developments, mostly in the US and in Europe. Due to my language skills which extend to English and, more tenuously, French, I can’t provide a more ‘global perspective’. Part five features a summary.

Barbara Herr Harthorn, head of UCSB’s [University of California at Santa Barbara) Center for Nanotechnology in Society (CNS), one of two such centers in the US (the other is at Arizona State University) was featured in a May 12, 2014 article by Lyz Hoffman for the [Santa Barbara] Independent.com,

… Barbara Harthorn has spent the past eight-plus years leading a team of researchers in studying people’s perceptions of the small-scale science with big-scale implications. Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, CNS enjoys national and worldwide recognition for the social science lens it holds up to physical and life sciences.

Earlier this year, Harthorn attended a meeting hosted by the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. The commission’s chief focus was on the intersection of ethics and brain research, but Harthorn was invited to share her thoughts on the relationship between ethics and nanotechnology.

(You can find Harthorn’s February 2014 presentation to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues here on their webcasts page.)

I have excerpted part of the Q&A (questions and answers) from Hoffman’s May 12, 2014 article but encourage you to read the piece in its entirety as it provides both a brief beginners’ introduction to nanotechnology and an insight into some of the more complex social impact issues presented by nano and other emerging technologies vis à vis neuroscience and human enhancement,

So there are some environmental concerns with nanomaterials. What are the ethical concerns? What came across at the Presidential Commission meeting? They’re talking about treatment of Alzheimer’s and neurological brain disorders, where the issue of loss of self is a fairly integral part of the disease. There are complicated issues about patients’ decision-making. Nanomaterials could be used to grow new tissues and potentially new organs in the future.

What could that mean for us? Human enhancement is very interesting. It provokes really fascinating discussions. In our view, the discussions are not much at all about the technologies but very much about the social implications. People feel enthusiastic initially, but when reflecting, the issues of equitable access and justice immediately rise to the surface. We [at CNS] are talking about imagined futures and trying to get at the moral and ethical sort of citizen ideas about the risks and benefits of such technologies. Before they are in the marketplace, [the goal is to] understand and find a way to integrate the public’s ideas in the development process.

Here again is a link to the article.

Links to other posts in the Brains, prostheses, nanotechnology, and human enhancement five-part series:

Part two: BRAIN and ethics in the US with some Canucks (not the hockey team) participating (May 19, 2014)

Part three: Gray Matters: Integrative Approaches for Neuroscience, Ethics, and Society issued May 2014 by US Presidential Bioethics Commission (May 20, 2014)

Part four: Brazil, the 2014 World Cup kickoff, and a mind-controlled exoskeleton (May 20, 2014)

Part five: Brains, prostheses, nanotechnology, and human enhancement: summary (May 20, 2014)

* ‘neursocience’ corrected to ‘neuroscience’ on May 20, 2014.

Regulators not prepared to manage nanotechnology risks according to survey

The focus of the survey mentioned in the heading is on the US regulatory situation regarding nanotechnology and, interestingly, much of the work was done by researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC; Vancouver, Canada). A Dec. 19, 2013 news item on Nanowerk provides an overview,

In a survey of nanoscientists and engineers, nano-environmental health and safety scientists, and regulators, researchers at the UCSB Center for Nanotechnology in Society (CNS) and at the University of British Columbia found that those who perceive the risks posed by nanotechnology as “novel” are more likely to believe that regulators are unprepared. Representatives of regulatory bodies themselves felt most strongly that this was the case. “The people responsible for regulation are the most skeptical about their ability to regulate,” said CNS Director and co-author Barbara Herr Harthorn.

“The message is essentially,” said first author Christian Beaudrie of the Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, “the more that risks are seen as new, the less trust survey respondents have in regulatory mechanisms. That is, regulators don’t have the tools to do the job adequately.”

The Dec. (?), 2013 University of California at Santa Barbara news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, adds this,

The authors also believe that when respondents suggested that more stakeholder groups need to share the responsibility of preparing for the potential consequences of nanotechnologies, this indicated a greater “perceived magnitude or complexity of the risk management challenge.” Therefore, they assert, not only are regulators unprepared, they need input from “a wide range of experts along the nanomaterial life cycle.” These include laboratory scientists, businesses, health and environmental groups (NGOs), and government agencies.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Expert Views on Regulatory Preparedness for Managing the Risks of Nanotechnologies by Christian E. H. Beaudrie, Terre Satterfield, Milind Kandlikar, Barbara H. Harthorn. PLOS [Public Library of Science] ONE Published: November 11, 2013 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0080250

All of the papers on PLOS ONE are open access.

I have taken a look at this paper and notice there will be a separate analysis of the Canadian scene produced at a later date. As for the US analysis, certainly this paper confirms any conjectures made based on my observations and intuitions about the situation given the expressed uneasiness from various groups and individuals about the regulatory situation.

I would have liked to have seen a critique of previous studies rather than a summary, as well as, a critique of the survey itself in its discussion/conclusion. I also would have liked to have seen an appendix with the survey questions listed in the order in which they were asked and seen qualitative research (one-on-one interviews) rather than 100% dependence on an email survey. That said, I was glad to see they reversed the meaning of some of the questions to doublecheck for someone who might indicate the same answers (e.g., 9 [very concerned]) throughout as a means of simplifying their participation,

Onward to the survey with an excerpt from the description of how it was conducted,

Subjects were contacted by email in a three-step process, including initial contact and two reminders at two-week intervals. Respondents received an ‘A’ or ‘B’ version of the survey at random, where the wording of several survey questions were modified to reverse the meaning of the question. Questions with alternate wording were reversed-coded during analysis to enable direct comparison of responses. Where appropriate the sequence of questions was also varied to minimize order effects.

Here’s how the researchers separated the experts into various groups (excerpted from the study),,

This study thus draws from a systematic sampling of US-based nano-scientists and engineers (NSE, n=114), nano-environmental health and safety scientists (NEHS, n=86), and regulatory decision makers and scientists (NREG, n=54), to characterize how well-prepared different experts think regulatory agencies are for the risk management of nanomaterials and applications. We tested the following hypothesis:

  1. (1) Expert views on whether US federal agencies are sufficiently prepared for managing any risks posed by nanotechnologies will differ significantly across classes of experts (NSE vs. NEHS. vs. NREG).

This difference across experts was anticipated and so tested in reference to four additional hypotheses:

  1. (2) Experts who see nanotechnologies as novel (i.e., as a new class of materials or objects) will view US federal regulatory agencies as unprepared for managing risks as compared to those who see nanotechnologies as not new (i.e., as little different from their bulk chemical form)
  2. (3) Experts who deem US federal regulatory agencies as less trustworthy will also view agencies as less prepared compared to those with more trust in agencies
  3. (4) Experts who attribute greater collective stakeholder responsibility (e.g. who view a range of stakeholders as equally responsible for managing risks) will see agencies as less prepared compared to those who attribute less responsibility.
  4. (5) Experts who are more socially and economically conservative will see regulatory agencies as more prepared compared to those with a more liberal orientation.

The researchers included Index Variables of trust, responsibility, conservatism, novelty-risks, and novelty-benefits in relationship to education, gender, field of expertise, etc. for a regression analysis. In the discussion (or conclusion), the authors had this to say (excerpted from the study),

Consistent differences exist between expert groups in their views on agency preparedness to manage nanotechnology risks, yet all three groups perceive regulatory agencies as unprepared. What is most striking however is that NREG experts see regulatory agencies as considerably less prepared than do their NSE or NEHS counterparts. Taking a closer look, the drivers of experts’ concerns over regulator preparedness tell a more nuanced story. After accounting for other differences, the ‘expert group’ classification per se does not drive the observed differences in preparedness perceptions. Rather a substantial portion of this difference results from differing assessments of the perceived novelty of risks across expert groups. Of the remaining variables, trust in regulators is a small but significant driver, and our findings suggest a link between concerns over the novelty of nanomaterials and the adequacy of regulatory design. Experts’ views on stakeholder responsibility are not particularly surprising since greater reliance on a collective responsibility model would need the burden to move away exclusively from regulatory bodies to other groups, and result presumptively in a reduced sense of preparedness.

Experts’ reliance in part upon socio-political values indicates that personal values also play a minor role in preparedness judgments.

I look forward to seeing the Canadian analysis. The paper is worth reading for some of the more subtle analysis I did not include here.