Nanotechnology - Nanotech Regulatory Document Archive - Arizona ...

one looks at ‘nano-enabled’ products on the market, as illustrated by the presentations from
BASF.
This opens a wide range of issues about what Abernathy (back in 1985 in a beautiful article
called after Schumpeter, the winds of creative destruction) called ‘revolutionary’ innovations,
that is radically new ways of designing and producing existing products.
Here the classical relationships with users about the functionalities of products are not
relevant for coping with change. What is at stake, we were told when discussing
nanoparticles, lies in potential hidden risks for health or the environment. This conference is a
marker of the growing importance given to procedures guarantying worker and consumer
safety.
Yet, we are faced with rather classical issues about technology assessment and the limitations of
after-the-fact approaches. We know from past cases how difficult such issues can be, taken in
between scientific controversies about health or environmental impacts, economic and political
interests, and consumer trust (and more often distrust) in information provided (even by public
authorities). Have we a good vision of on-going developments ? This is not sure if I look at the
few on-going studies made on consumers’ perceptions and practices. Have we fully learnt from
past cases? GMO and Asbestos are cases in point, but there has been many others from which
to learn (for instance the Shell Oil Rig in the 1990s). History becomes a resource to take
distance (as recalled by Dominique Pestre in his recent work for the EC group on convergence).
Here is for me a clear case where programmes take too many things for granted and where it is
important to develop research that will help to better delineate problems.
(3) Social impacts
Are nano-enabled products and markets the sole direction? Clearly no, told us M. Rocco in his
introductory lecture. Abernathy then spoke of ‘architectural innovations’, that is innovations that
break both from previous technologies and from previous uses.
Studies have shown that such innovations entail transformations not only on our agreed
knowledge base (as our guest, R. Tomellini, and the previous speaker, M. Takemura, come from
Steel research, I do not resist to recall how difficult it has been to change the received wisdom
about how much coal could be injected in blast furnaces, a beautiful comparative analysis made
between France and Japan by one of my ex-PhD students, E. Jolivet), but also on the definition
of relevant qualities (and corresponding norms and standards, including safety) and on the
societal values they embed (remember the exemplary case of Edison and city lighting, where the
invention of the incandescent bulb went with arguments about safety and hygiene in the city of
New York).
It has been one central lesson from science studies to show that all these innovations were both
technically and socially shaped, and, as brilliantly demonstrated by Bruno Latour and Arie Rip,
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