Who Knows Nano?

Those who work in the field of nanoscale science and nanotechnology tend to believe that the world shares their obsession. Believe me, nothing could be further from the truth.

My book, The Nanotech Pioneers, relates the story of a survey that a fellow journalist and I conducted in a bar in Columbia, South Carolina to determine how many people there had actually heard the term “nanotechnology” before. We found one patron, an aerospace engineer, who knew what we were talking about.

More recently, a more scientific survey of 700 Americans has been done by Dietram Scheufele, (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Bruce Lewenstein (Cornell University). They found (surprise, surprise) that Americans know little about nanotechnology. Less than half knew the difference between a nanometer and an atom, which doesn’t say much for scientific education in this country. Of those who had heard of nanotechnology, most were positively disposed toward it. Those that were negative toward nanotech cited previous controversies concerning genetic engineering and stem cell research.

Another survey was done by two media experts for a report sponsored by Wilson Center's Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies. “The most notable characteristic of media coverage of nanotechnology is the lack of it,” said Andrew Laing, president of Cormex Research. The findings were drawn from a 2004 survey of top U.S. and Canadian newspapers. They discovered that American and Canadian newspapers print, on average, about one nanotechnology article of substance per month.

Yet another study by Sharon Friedman of Lehigh University illuminates another problem. The study focused on U.S. or British articles about health effects or environmental risks of nanotechnology, as reported in the Lexis/Nexus database. “While in both countries, news stories were overall balanced, article headlines were not,” said Friedman. “Close to half of them were negative: 48 percent in the U.S. and 44 percent of the U.K. articles.” Which is a real problem, since most people don’t actually go as far as reading the articles.

What should be done? Maybe the nanotech industry should take a page from the Pentagon’s play book and hire the Lincoln Group to place pre-paid positive articles into the news media. For a small fraction of the $100 million paid by the Pentagon I would gladly participate.