S.NET and NanoEthics: A Pair of Siblings

Abstract

This editorial has been written on the way back from the 7th annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies (S.NET), which was once again a truly inspiring and instructive event. The conference was held in Montreal in October under the title BFrom Nanotechnologies to Emerging Technologies: Towards a Global Responsibility^ and was mainly organised by the knowledge network Ne3LS, a very noteworthy long-term initiative set up by the Government of Quebec to examine the ethical, environmental, economic, legal and social issues raised by the development of nanotechnology. S.NET and this journal can be described as a pair of siblings.NanoEthics is a little older, its first issue having been published back in 2007, while the first S.NET meeting annual meeting took place in 2009. Both are children of the first wave of research and discussions on nanotechnology, but also established themselves early on as important forums for reflection on new and emerging science and technology more generally, including other fields of technology and a wide variety of aspects of current technoscience. Recently, NanoEthics has changed its subtitle to Studies of New and Emerging Technologies, and S.NET is about to change its full name to the Society for Studies of New and Emerging Technologies. Both siblings are open to impulses that come from beyond academia, such as contributions by civil society activists, industry representatives, policy makers, early technology adopters and artists. There are large overlaps, not only thematically but also in terms of the people involved.While the journal’s readers and contributors come from a wide variety of academic communities and NanoEthics is certainly not S.NET’s house journal, there is clearly a special relationship between the two at many levels. The present issue is a particular testament to this, since the authors of its first two articles gave talks in Montreal, and an entire special section is based on a session at last year’s S.NET annual meeting. In the first article, Vanessa Chenel, Patrick Boissy, Jean-Pierre Cloarec and Johane Patenaude analyse acceptability judgments concerning the use of nanocarrierbased targeted drug delivery. After sending out a questionnaire to a large number of Francophone scientists and scholars in Canada and Europe, they conducted interviews with a subset of the respondents, half of whom were French and half Canadian, while half were natural scientists or engineers and half social scientists or humanities scholars. The authors highlight contextual factors that bring about variability in acceptability judgments, arguing that effective consideration of these contextual factors could add a supplementary layer of information to assessment procedures and improve stakeholder discourse on technological innovation. In the second article, Daniele Ruggiu contrasts two versions of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), the important new European approach to science, Nanoethics (2015) 9:197–198 DOI 10.1007/s11569-015-0246-x