Book Review for NanoEthics

Abstract

Founded in 1996 the Europaische Akademie zur Erforschung von Folgen wissenschaftlich-technischer Entwicklungen (European Academy of Technology Assessment) is devoted to “the scientific study of the consequences of scientific and technological advance for individual and social life and for the natural environment” (www.europaeische-akademie-aw.de). The Academy is located in Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, close to the former federal capital of Germany, Bonn, and financed by the local state government and the Federal Aerospace Center with regular project funding coming from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Its main approach consists in identifying important TA issues and setting up corresponding interdisciplinary project groups staffed with invited scholars from academia who regularly meet over a period of several years to produce a report. For the present report, a project group on “Nanomaterials, Nanodevices, Nanocomputing: Determination of Present Position and Perspectives” was established in July 2003, chaired by chemist Gunter Schmid and consisting of the 13 authors of the volume as members who are said to have met on a monthly basis up to December 2005. The members appear to be all Germans, although some are located at Swiss and Austrian institutions, with disciplinary backgrounds ranging from chemistry, physics, materials science, and electrical engineering to toxicology, philosophy, and business administration. The goal of the project group was not only “to evaluate the state of the art in nanoscience and nanotechnology”, but also to consider “—to some extent—philosophical, ethical, toxicological and, last but not least, economic aspects” (p. IX). The report has a clear and convincing structure: After a kind of executive summary including recommendations, a general introduction that summarizes the subsequent chapters (Chap. 1), and a philosophy of science introduction (Chap. 2), the bulk or more than half of the volume consists in a systematic and meticulous survey of selected nanotechnological research fields (Chap. 3), to be followed by a patent analysis (Chap. 4), discussions of risk analysis and management (Chap 5) and ethical aspects (Chap. 6), and some brief notes on knowledge transfer (Chap. 7). With the exception of Chapters 3 and 7, most of the content of the chapters appears to be written each by a single author, who are easy to recognize from the (self-) references and previous publications, despite the alleged collective authorship. This, and the unusually long list of book authors, makes the book another interesting publication experiment in between governmental and nongovernmental organizations reports with anonymously written texts that are quickly posted on the Internet, on the one hand, and academic monographs and anthologies with clear indication of authorship that Nanoethics (2008) 2:209–212 DOI 10.1007/s11569-008-0039-6