It is ironic that I should write a post on how communities
of science police the boundaries of their field shortly after writing a blog post on how nations hurt themselves by policing their boundaries. But a paper in Administrative Science Quarterly by Stine Grodal has exactly that theme and
some important conclusions. Plus, it is about nanotechnology, something we have
heard about and think will shape the future of the world but don’t understand
well.
In fact, what I just wrote echoes the start of the
nanotechnology field. It was a term coined and advocated by futurists, it was
and still is claimed to be a source of advances in science, technology, and business
that will change individual lives and society, and it has been redefined many
times. The redefinitions of the field are important because they are partly a
consequence of these futurists and others with an interest in the term,
especially the government, grappling with the question of how best to define
the boundaries of the nanotechnology field so that it attracts the right kind
of support from others and makes the kind of advances that are desired.
Nanotechnology became a very successful field, in part
because of government intervention in the traditional way: giving out money to
those engaged in research on nanotechnology. The other source of success was
interest in nanotechnology companies from venture capitalists, who expressed
their interest the same way: they provided money. This initiated an identity
crisis because it soon became clear to the futurists that there were many in
the world with little interest in their vision but significant interest in
money and other resources that were becoming available, and they had the ability
to fit their activities into the loosely defined field of nanotechnology. After
all, entrepreneurs are well known for creativity in the pursuit of funding, and
scientists are (this is less well known) extremely creative in the pursuit of
funding.
The result was a backlash. The creators of the field, the
futurists, looked at all the newcomers and their flexible definitions of
nanotech, and thought they were changing the meaning of the term and were
pursuing different futures than the one originally envisioned. Government
officials saw a flood of funding applications and realized that the topics were
too spread out to provide any kind of consistency unless the funding agency
enforced it. Government interest in nanotechnology started with the futurists’
initiatives, so officials could ask the futurists for help in making a stricter
definition of the field. The futurists were pleased to help, given that the
field was losing clarity and they were losing funding as competition increased.
Interestingly, even some interlopers such as scientists and entrepreneurs
started rethinking the meaning of nanotech, seeing it as too trendy a term and
not well enough connected to their work.
