But Mooney has trouble setting aside his fears that the new technology will go awry. He is not particularly worried about tiny robots creating copies of themselves until they crowd out human life -- the "gray goo" catastrophe posited by some scientists and popularized in Michael Crichton's recent novel, Prey.
Instead, Mooney fears what he calls green goo: microorganisms that have been manipulated through nanotechnology to take over the function of machines but that begin reproducing out of control.
He worries about environmental damage and diseases driven by unexpected responses of people and other living things to the accumulation in their systems of artificial particles the Earth has never seen before.
Nanotechnology experts who have been paying closer attention to ETC and Mooney are less dismissive than Roco. "Making fun of Pat Mooney is not the way to go here," said Christine Peterson, co-founder and president of the Foresight Institute, nanotechnology's leading forum for discussion. "This is a sincere, smart man who doesn't have any trouble with logic."
Another expert who voices at least grudging respect is Kevin D. Ausman, executive director for operations at the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology at Rice University, a new federally financed research center. "ETC is the first nonscientific group to start to address the issue of toxic impact of nanomaterials," Ausman said. But he expressed dismay that ETC is warning of risks he considers to be in the realm of science fiction, like green goo.
Putting Mooney most at odds with the nanotechnology community is his call for a moratorium on research and commercialization until international agreements have been reached on ways to assess and monitor nanotechnology's risks. Roco and others say that such problems are already being addressed and that a research moratorium would impede scientists' understanding of nanoparticles -- natural and artificial -- that already exist, while delaying the potential health and environmental benefits of new nanoproducts and systems.
But Peterson, of the Foresight Institute, recalls Mooney's response when she questioned his strategy of calling for a moratorium: "It gets people's attention."
RSS