Science & Nature SpecialNanotechnology

Once again we have the Prince of Wales to thank for alerting us to the latest apocalypse that scientists are planning to unleash upon mankind. Having attacked GM foods in the past, and after much hand-wringing over how scientists are reducing the world to a ‘laboratory of life’, the Prince has turned his attention to nanotechnology, the ability to manipulate matter at scales of a nanometre (a billionth of a metre).

As you will have read over the last few weeks, Prince Charles’s great worry is that swarms of ‘nanomachines’ will reduce everything in their path to ‘grey goo’. And if the idea sounds like a cracking storyline for a science-fiction novel, that’s because it is. This scary scenario was presented to the public by Michael Crichton in his book Prey. In fact, it is likely that Prey itself is ultimately responsible for all the current scaremongering and hysteria about nanotechnology.

The sci-fi saga was read on holiday last summer by one of the Prince’s advisers, Sir Jonathon Porritt, who has since expressed great concern. Porritt’s worry, inspired by Crichton, is that nanotechnology opens up the prospect of mixing and matching nature’s building blocks ‘to produce new materials never before identified in nature’.

The idea that humans have the ability to shuffle nature’s building blocks more than nature herself already has is entirely potty. But it is even more depressing that the monarch-in-waiting has allowed himself to be influenced by a man whose knee-jerk response seems to be to oppose scientific developments.

Why all the fuss now, for heaven’s sake? Public discussion of nanotechnology dates back to 1959, when the physicist Richard Feynman delivered a historic lecture on atomic-scale technologies. The ‘grey goo problem’ was floated in 1986 by the futurist Eric Drexler in his book Engines of Creation.