Tag Archives: regulations

The availability heuristic and the perception of risk

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It’s taking a lot longer to go through the Risk Management Principles for Nanotechnology article than I expected. But, let’s move onwards. “Availability” is the other main heuristic used when trying to understand how people perceive risk. This one is about how we assess the likelihood of one or more risks.

According to researchers, individuals who can easily recall a memory specific to a given harm are predisposed to overestimating the probability of its recurrence, compared to to other more likely harms to which no memory is attached. p. 49 in Nanoethics, 2008, vol. 2

This memory extends beyond your personal experience (although it remains the most powerful) all the way to reading or hearing about an incident.  The effect can also be exacerbated by imagery and social reinforcement. Probably the most powerful, recent example would be ‘frankenfoods’. We read about the cloning of Dolly the sheep who died soon after her ‘brith’, there was the ‘stem cell debate, and ‘mad cow disease’ which somehow got mixed together in a debate on genetically modified food evolving into a discussion about biotechnology in general. The whole thing was summed as ‘frankenfood’ a term which fused a very popular icon of science gone mad, Frankenstein, with the food we put in our mouths. (Note: It is a little more complicated than that but I’m not in the mood to write a long paper or dissertation where every nuance and development is discussed.) It was propelled by the media and activists had one of their most successful campaigns.

Getting back to ‘availability’ it is a very powerful heuristic to use when trying to understand how people perceive risk.

The thing with ‘frankenfoods’ is that wasn’t planned. Susan Tyler Hitchcock in her book, ‘Frankensein; a cultural history’ (2007), traces the birth of the term in a 1992 letter written by Paul Lewis to the New York Times through to its use as a clarion cry for activists, the media, and a newly worried public. Lewis coined the phrase and one infers from the book that it was done casually. The phrase was picked up by other media outlets and other activists (Lewis is both a professor and an activist). For the full story, check out Tyler’s book pp. 288-294.

I have heard the ETC Group as being credited with the ‘frankenfoods’ debate and pushing the activist agenda. While they may have been active in the debate, I have not been able to find any documentation to support the contention that the ETC Group made it happen. (Please let me know if you have found something.)

The authors (Marchant, Sylvester, and Abbott) of this risk management paper feel that nanotechnology is vulnerable to the same sort of cascading effects that the ‘availability’ heuristic provides a framework for understanding. Coming next, a ‘new’ risk management model.

The affect heuristic and risk management principles

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Continuing still with the article by Marchant, Sylvester, and Abbott (Risk Management Principles for Nanotechnology) but first a comment about the report released yesterday by the US National Research Council. I haven’t had a chance to look at it but the report coverage points to agreement between a surprising set of stakeholders to the effect that there is no appropriate governance (regulation) of nanotechnology. The stakeholders include scientists, industry heavyweights such as BASF and Dupont as well as non-for-profit organizations (American Chemical Council and Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies). They didn’t mention any activist groups in the materials I’ve seen but I can’t imagine any disagreement for those quarters.

It’s intriguing that this panel report from the US National Research Council has been released the same week that Nature Nanotechnology has published data from ‘the [sic] Cognition Project’ at Yale Law School warning about possible ‘culture wars’ and Dietram Scheufele’s latest findings about the impact religion might have on the adoption of nanotechnology. It’s possible that someone is masterminding all of this but I think there’s a more likely scenario. Most of the people of the involved know each other because there’s a loose network. They are concerned about the potential for problems and when they talk to each other they find out about each other’s projects and encourage them. At some point they may have decided that it would be a good tactic to release reports and publish in Nature Nanotechnology at roughly the same time. Consequently, they got lucky and the various media cooperated unknowingly with this impromptu plan. Conversely, nobody talked to anyone about these various projects and they got lucky. What I don’t believe is that they developed some master plan and carried it out.

On to heuristics. As I understand the word, it means guidelines (more or less). In this paper, the authors discuss two specific heuristics that relate to risk perception. (If you’re going to manage risk, you need to understand how it’s perceived.)

Where nanotechnology is concerned, ‘Affect” is considered to be an important heuristic when examining the public’s perception of risk. (Affect is how you feel about something.) Here’s something interesting from the paper,

… numerous studies have shown that where individuals believe a technology has high benefits, they automatically believe its risks are low. This negative correlation has been shown to affect both lay and expert opinions, and is robust even in the face of countervailing evidence. … In short, how individuals feel about a particular stimulus directs how they perceive its dangers or benefits. p. 48

What fascinates me is that your knowledge about the topic be it expert or amateur is still heavily affected by whether or not you believe the technology is beneficial even when evidence suggests that the dangers are huge.

There’s more about ‘affect’ in the article, if you’re interested, get the journal Nanoethics, 2008, vol. 2, pp. 43-60. Meanwhile, there’s another heuristic that the authors are using to build their case for a new risk management principle. The other heuristic is ‘Availability’ and more about that tomorrow.

Why assess nano risks?

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It seems like there’s a pretty obvious answer…because it could be dangerous…but risk is usually discussed along with regulatory oversight and policy which has implications for research funding, consumer acceptance, and more. So back the article on risk management where they cite three traditional risk management principles

(a) acceptable risk (b) cost-benefit analysis, and (c) feasbility (or best avaialble technology).

In acceptable risk, you figure what the risks are and then work to minimize them until you have a technology with an acceptable level of risk. In a cost-benefit analysis, you determine if the benefits and the costs are equal, there are more benefits than costs, or there are more costs than benefits. This is generally speaking, bottom-line driven. In the third principle, feasibility (or best available technology), skips over any analysis of risk (unlike the other two principles), according the article,

This approach, which requres reduction of risks to the lowerst level technoligcally or ecooomically feasible, has the advantage of not requiring information about risks or benefits.

This one has me a little confused as it suggests that the risk has already been assessed somehow but this is no longer brought into the final equation. In other words, if we decide that steam is superior to electricity as an agent for power, we haven’t discussed the risks per se but this is implied when determining the most feasible technology for the job.

There are more principles to come tomorrow including the precautionary principle.

UK Royal Commission concludes that nano should be regulated and synthetic bio event reminder

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According to the online BBC News, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution has suggested that reporting the use of nanomaterials in industrial applications become mandatory and that establishing tests for danger and regulatory insight be undertaken cooperatively and internationally. The Commission advised against a blanket moratorium or ban on the development of nanomaterials because there are so many potential benefits. The members of the commission focused their efforts on how nanomaterials function rather than their size or dimension. There’s more from the article here.

On a personal basis, this is rather timely as I’m trying to write up a PhD research proposal and I’ve remarked on this obsession with ‘nano numbers’ as it were. There’s a group of people at Cornell University who are trying to find ways to convey size as a means of educating the public about nanotechnology. I don’t think that’s a good idea after having tried that strategy a few times in conference presentations and watching my audiences’ eyes glaze over. Most of us don’t have any sense of how big a germ is but we can imagine it and I think that’s what will happen with nanomaterials — we will be able to imagine them. Or for another example, what about electricity? We don’t see it but we take it for granted and we have a pretty good sense that certain activities could kill or severely harm us, i. e. “Don’t touch a live wire” or “Don’t stick a knife into your toaster when it’s plugged in and switched on.”

The Synthetic Bio: Coming Up Fast! event organized by the Project on Emerging Nanotechnolgies is taking place on Nov. 14, 2008. (The first notice for this event was in my Oct. 28, 2008 posting.) The webcast has been delayed to 1:45 pm ET or, as I think of it, 10:45 am PT.  If you’re planning to attend the live event, check out the details here.

Framing nano and more

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There seems to be a lot more discussion about risks and regulation this year than there was last year. I found more on nano governance this morning. The project is called, Framing Nano,  funded by the European Commission, with a mission to foster international dialogue on regulatory frameworks.

On a child friendly note, ‘The World of the Tiny’, an exhibit at the Children’s Museum in Mexico City is all about nano and some of the scientific information in the show was provided by Dupont Mexico. The Nanowerk News article is here.

Following on a Spanish language note, Nanotechnologia Aragon-Cataluna (NanoAracat) has a nano wiki (in English).

Nanowiki is a digital online publication, developed in the frame of NanoAracat, to track the evolution of paradigms and discoveries in the nanoscience and nanotechnology field, annotate and disseminate them, giving an overall view and feed the essential public debate on nanotechnology and its practical applications.

The parent website, NanoAracat, is here and the NanoWiki is here.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) recently posted an article on nanotechnology that looks very similar to the material in an article by Martin Mittelstaedt (definitely behind a paywall as I just checked) that was printed in the Globe and Mail a few weeks ago when the Council of Canadian Academies released their report for the Government of Canada on nanotechnology and possible risks.

Now I’m off to work on my own nano wiki, The Nanotech Mysteries.

Skincare a la nanotechnology and nano safety legislation

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Starting with the safety legislation…May 7, 2008, the US House of Representatives passed a motion to strengthen research into nanotechnology safety according to the US government website here. Some of the headlines in blogosphere seemed to suggest that they had actually passed regulations but headlines can be a little misleading. In fact, the amendment also directs the  National Nanotechnology Initiative (it seems to be an umbrella agency for US nanotech research) to focus on moving the research out of the labs and into commercial applications while finding ways to attract more students to study nanotechnology. Hmmm….how do you get commercial production going and study safety issues simultaneously? Generally speaking, safer means slower.

Meanwhile, I came across the AdorageMD skin care line. They bill it as skin couture and their formula developed using nanotechnology. These products were included in the gift bags for the movie stars who went to the Oscars earlier this year. I find it fascinating that the company name suggests medical involvement. Plus I found a description of their products on a health care website here. You’d think there’d be some kind of critique on a health care website but you’d be wrong (as was I).

All of this is more fodder for the paper I’m writing about nano and risk, although I’m focused on popular culture (hence the interest in AdorageMD and the movie stars). One other comment, if you look back at other kinds of technology adoption e.g. electricity, you’ll find similarities with discussions taking place today.

Oh, there is some Canadian nanotechnolgy news today…the Ontario government is building a quantum computing and nanotechnology research facility at the University of Waterloo. It’s going be called the Quantum-Nano Centre.