Nanotechnology subsidies and regulation
A letter, End Subsidies for Nanotechnology, published by the Washington Post in response to the story "For Science, Nanotech Poses Big Unknowns" (see Nanodot post) claims that government funding of nanotechnology will undermine self-regulation of industry via the liability market.
The letter from Wayne Crews of the Cato Institute:
Those seeking regulatory oversight of nanotechnology ["For Science, Nanotech Poses Big Unknowns," front page, Feb. 1] should pay more attention to ways that the dominance of government funding for the technology undermines self-regulation.
Dangerous, uninsurable ventures will rightly scare off investors. But government domination and subsidization of frontier scientific research can take it out of the realm of insurability and even provide immunity, such as that provided by the Price-Andersen Act, which limits the liability of nuclear power plants. More worrisome, today's military and homeland security emphasis on nanotech can have significant implications for nanotechnology's evolution and for the public policy stance taken toward it. Homeland security legislation already indemnifies some companies from liability when their "security technologies" fail. Taken too far, government control of nanotechnology can mean a liability market may never emerge.
If one is concerned about nano-safety, subsidies should end, and the private sector should pick up the tab and the responsibility.
WAYNE CREWS
Director, Technology Studies, Cato Institute, Washington
February 14th, 2004 at 7:53 PM
Sorry, but *some* regulation is necessary
It's weird, me being a technophile yet not being a Libertarian (In the little el or big el sense of that word.), seeing how stuff like cryonics, life extension and nanotechnology bring persons of this ideological stripe out of the woodwork. Are there no technophiles on the left? Well, I am one at least!
Sorry, but scientific research has needed government subsidy from at least the time of ancient Greece. Perhaps back in ancient days a few scientists or natural philosophers were lucky enough to secure the patronage of rich individuals with a love of abstract knowledge, but these days most funding from the private sector comes with strings attached, for example, research funded by the tobacco companies.
The private sector is not going to make money or gadgets off of high energy particle physics or advances in group theory, so this research, in the Libertarian paradise often advocated by the Cato Institute, would rarely get funded. Abstract knowledge is rarely profitable. Currently MNT research is still at the abstract knowledge phase–the Goddard/Tsiokovsky phase. If we remove government subsidy (even though I am very nervous about military research.), MNT progress slows to a crawl. One only has to think about the NanoBusiness Alliance to understand this.
Secondly, of course most nanotech advocates can agree on the foolishness of bans and bad policy based on ill-informed alarm from deep ecologists and religious conservatives, but in the real world there needs to be some government oversight in addition to industry and scientific self-regulation. I'm not talking about corrupt, communist bureaucrats here, just a few policing agencies, nationally and internationally, and a few treaties and laws to see that research is conducted openly and that we all trust one another.
Sorry for the diatribe, but the Cato Institute often irritates me with what I perceive to be smug simplicity. Nanotech is far too subtle and slippery for that.