Tue, Feb 04, 2003 page5

• Group warns about nanotech use

  FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN The ETC Group warns of the risks of allowing big business to pursue technologies whose health consequences are not fully understood

  • NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  The ETC Group releases nervous commentary on nanotechnology in somewhat the same way Microsoft publishes software: Each version is compatible with what was said before but adds new features.

  The latest effort by ETC -- which pronounces its name "et cetera" -- is an 80-page illustrated manifesto called "The Big Down," its most elaborate effort yet to generate alarm among the global network of social, labor and environmental groups.

  

  The latest effort by ETC to alert people about nanotechnology is an 80-page manifesto called The Big Down. Pat Roy Mooney executive director of the ETC group, in his Winnipeg, Canada, office last week.

  PHOTO: NY TIMES

  Nanotechnology refers to the manipulation of matter at the scale of atoms and molecules to create novel forms of common materials, like carbon molecules arranged in nanotubes, which are 100 times as strong as steel but much lighter. Proponents describe a future in which nanotechnology will lead to other wonders, like minute diagnostic systems to detect cancers when they are no more than a few cells in size, or data-storage systems that could contain the Library of Congress in a device the size of a sugar cube.

  But The Big Down warns of the risks of allowing big business to pursue and promote technologies whose health and environmental consequences may not be fully understood.

  The rhetoric is hardly dispassionate.

  "Today," it warns, "mighty Goliath [industrial corporations] has learned his lesson and is exploiting the power of small to become mightier still, while little David [society] cannot even see his opponent."

  That might all seem like ignorable fringe-group ranting if ETC and its executive director, Pat Roy Mooney, did not already have a reputation for successfully stirring things up. During the 1990s, they faced down Monsanto and other chemical giants in a public debate over the ethics of creating genetically modified plants whose seeds were sterile.

  And like the manifesto, Mooney is more often cautiously earnest than shrill.

  "We are not assuming this is an evil, awful technology," Mooney said recently. "I suspect quite a bit can be done that's useful." The danger, he said, is that governments and public interest groups do not have enough control over assessing risks and setting priorities.

  Mooney began distributing the report 10 days ago in Porto Alegre, Brazil, at the World Social Forum, a gathering held annually to coincide with the far more well-heeled World Economic Summit in Davos, Switzerland. It is also posted on ETC's Web site (www.etcgroup.org).

  ETC consists of just seven employees in Winnipeg, Manitoba, its headquarters, and in Carrboro, North Carolina; Mexico City; and Oxford, England. Its annual budget is roughly US$525,000, most of it raised from donors, like the Rockefeller Foundation, that have long been involved with the needs of developing countries.

  Mooney, 55, who has been legally blind since the age of 12, is a native of the prairies near Winnipeg. He cheerfully admits that he dropped out of high school shortly before he would have been kicked out for ignoring his studies.

  His resume includes working as a consultant for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization as a young man and subsequent involvement in a wide range of development projects in Asia, Africa and Latin America. But he has no credentials as a researcher in nanotechnology, a field that takes its name from the word nanometer -- one-billionth of a meter.

  In a recent telephone interview, Mihail C. Roco, the head of the US government's National Nanotechnology Initiative, dismissed ETC as "nonscientific" and "a group that fights against technology." In fact, though, Mooney agrees completely with authorities like Roco that nanotechnology is the next big thing.

  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."
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