Nano-Hype: The Truth Behind the Nanotechnology Buzz and The Nanotech Pioneers: Where Are They Taking Us?
DOI: 10.1063/1.2731977
Nanotechnology has entered today’s general discourse. This trend has provided an opportunity for society, particularly its young people, to learn about and appreciate technology’s role in maintaining the nation’s polity and economy. Previous books such as The Dance of Molecules: How Nanotechnology Is Changing Our Lives (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006) by Ted Sargent; Nanotechnology: A Gentle Introduction to the Next Big Idea (Prentice Hall, 2003), which I cowrote with my son Daniel Ratner; and Understanding Nanotechnology: From the Editors of “Scientific American” (Warner, 2002) have attempted to describe and discuss nanotechnology for nonspecialists. David M. Berube’s Nano-Hype: The Truth Behind the Nanotechnology Buzz and Steven A. Edwards’s The Nanotech Pioneers: Where Are They Taking Us? offer very different viewpoints in an attempt to cover some of the same ground.
Berube, a professor of communication studies at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, has done extensive homework for his book: It has 521 pages of text, including 105 pages of footnotes and 36 pages of bibliography. According to the book’s blurb, the author “investigates the gossip and rumors and reveals the underlying motives of the hypesters and pitchmasters.” Much of the text consists of direct quotes, including some reasonable and accurate ones. For example, Berube cites Mihail Roco, senior adviser for nanotechnology at NSF. Roco emphasizes that the inclusion of social scientists and humanistic scholars is important to the National Nanotechnology Initiative: “They are professionally trained representatives of the public interest and capable of functioning as communicators between nanotechnologists and the public or government officials. Their input may help maximize the societal benefits of the technology while reducing the possibility of debilitating public controversies” (page 311).
Yet among such careful thoughts are many pages of inflated prose and claims, often without distinction, that Berube has filtered from the broad literature on nanotechnology. A lot of hype is indeed out there, so the topic of choice for his book is good—but the product is not. The publishers have apparently done little if any editing; the book is full of misspellings, terrible grammar, and inaccuracies. For example, the author’s statement on page 41 that “nanotechnology is not only something we can’t see but also something that isn’t here yet” is seriously wrong, given the existence of major industrial processes such as giant magnetoresistance drives and zeolite catalysis for high-octane gasoline and many specific nanoproducts. Similarly, his remark on page 289 that carbon nanotubes are “being produced at a greater rate than other nanoparticles” is incorrect, as is clear from Berube’s comment 10 pages later that the Illinois-based Nanophase Technologies Corp shipped more than 450 tons of zinc oxide nanoparticles in 2002.
Worse than those simple errors is the level of repetition and confusion in many sentences: “Once again, the action devolves to uncontrolled replication when the issue is corporate concentration, the antecedent to their claims” (page 268); and “Only an audience with a sophisticated understanding of the subject and the argumentative subterfuge can be persuaded by the denials based in reality against the fictitious assumptions of the opposition” (page 275).
Nevertheless, Berube has some good ideas and addresses some important issues. For example, he covers societal and ethical implications as well as government initiatives and actors. Had his book been better edited, it might have been a useful contribution to the literature on nanotechnology, although from a specific point of view that focuses on inflated claims.
The Nanotech Pioneers by Edwards, who is a medical-technology analyst and science writer with a doctorate in biology, is better because it is shorter and has financial figures and creative illustrations. It provides an appropriate overview of many areas of interest and contains some relevant history and descriptions of some commercial advances. It even discusses a bit of the same hype that Berube documents.
But, like Berube’s book, the lack of editing is destructive. The first eight pages of chapter 1 contain five errors, ranging from a statement that is both factually and grammatically incorrect—“nanotech seeks to rebuild the world one molecule (or even one atom) a time”—to incorrect descriptions about the bonding in graphite and in diamond. On page 36 the author describes the birth of the National Nanotechnology Initiative and misspells van der Waals forces and the names of Paul Alivisatos and James Murday. In addition, Edwards makes several technical and historical errors. For example, the silicon from which chips are made is not analogous to the stone in lithography (page 41), nor did Erwin Schrödinger become famous for his uncertainty principle (page 44). Also, the level of tunneling current is not directly proportional to the distance between scanning tip and surface (page 57).
Such editing errors make the book much more difficult to read and can confuse nonscientists. In addition, the author’s topic choices are questionable. Although the book claims to be about nanotech pioneers, with pages and pages on Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil, the names of Sam Stupp and Alan Heeger—true nanotech pioneers—are not mentioned. Lots of information is discussed from the first chapter to the last, including the gray- and green-goo scenarios in which nanobots or bioengineered life forms run amok and take over the world. But the author does not discuss such challenging and promising nanotechnology advances as regenerative medicine or custom coatings.
The books by Berube and Edwards discuss a timely and interesting topic. But for each, a well-edited second edition might help a lot. In the interim, better analysis of nanotechnology is out there. More scientists and engineers should take up the challenge of writing it right. It is important for the public and private sectors to understand the ideas and challenges behind nanotechnology; unfortunately, Nano-Hype and The Nanotech Pioneers may do more to add to the confusion than to clarify the concepts, applications, and people involved.
More about the Authors
Mark A. Ratner. Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, US .
