Nanotechnology - the manipulation of matter on the atomic scale - is recognised everywhere as the next major technological revolution.

Billions of dollars are being spent world-wide in the race to develop nano-devices and materials, with many already on the market. Little, however, is said about the dark side of nanotech: hazardous substances, military applications, and a huge leap in corporate power. To hear more, Corporate Watch hooked up with Jim Thomas of the ETC group, one of the only bodies currently campaigning on nanotech.

For a lot of people, the word “nanotechnology” still invokes the image of tiny robots that go inside you and fix things. Is that what we're talking about?

Not really. Nanotech is a more general term - it refers to any technology that's manipulating nature on the nano-scale, the size of atoms and molecules. A nanometre is one billionth of a metre, about 1/80,000 the width of a human hair, or ten hydrogen atoms side by side. So what you're doing is manipulating individual atoms, placing them into new molecular structures that don't exist in nature. The basic idea was spelled out in 1959 by Nobel prize winner Richard Feynman, who in a speech called “Plenty of Room at the Bottom” said he saw no feasible reason not to arrange atoms one by one. Then in the 80s a guy called Eric Drexler wrote a book called “Engines of Creation”, where he imagined doing this by engineering nano-robots, which would first arrange atoms around them and then make copies of themselves.

So this is the science fiction version. What's the reality?

Nanotechnology is all around us. Many products on the market are already being engineered on the nano-scale. The most famous example are the nano-scale Titanium Dioxide particles (Ti02) used in transparent sunblock. The material in its normal molecular size is white, so it's very good at scattering UV light. However, as you reduce the size of any molecule to the nano-scale, it changes its properties - basically because the laws of quantum mechanics “kick in” at a certain point. So on a nano-scale, where the clumps of TiO2 are maybe a thousand atoms large, they retain their light scattering properties but actually become see-through. Nano-scale TiO2 is also used in the “active glass” produced by Pilkington, one of the largest glass manufacturers in the world. The glass has TiO2 nano-particles on the outside, and on that scale they become very reactive. So when UV light hits them, it causes a reaction that burns off any dirt on the glass, which then washes off when it rains. Another example is nano-trousers, which are already sold in places like the Gap. They have a coating of nano-particles attached to the fibres, which are again very reactive, so water and dirt are easily removed.

Then there are the two “miracle molecules” of nanotech that everybody's talking about, both new arrangements of carbon atoms. Carbon usually appears in nature as coal, graphite or diamonds. But nano-scientists have developed a new form which is called a Bucky-ball, named after the architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller. A Bucky-ball is sixty carbon atoms arranged as a hollow ball. It seems to be be one of the strongest things we know of - much stronger than steel or titanium - as well as having all sorts of unusual electrical properties. Another molecule is carbon nano-tubes. They're about one nanometre wide, six times lighter than steel and a hundred times stronger, and they conduct electricity better than copper can. Because they're hollow you can use them to deliver pharmaceuticals into the body, and they're also the basis of things like nano-electronics and nano-computers. Sales of carbon nano-tubes already total over 2 billion dollars per year. They are also being used to strengthen things like tyres and tennis rackets, as well as the sides of cars and aeroplanes.

All of this seems fascinating and very useful. So what's the big deal?

Well, we can begin by talking about direct risks. These are new substances which we know very little about, but already almost every single study into the toxicity of nano-particles has found that they tend to be more toxic, and differently so, than their normal-sized equivalents. More importantly, they're able to go places that particles couldn't do previously. Because of their size they can get into the lungs without being challenged by white blood cells, they can get across the blood-brain barrier, and they seem to be able to get into a pregnant woman's placenta. Nano-particles deposited in the nose go straight to the brain. So we're dealing with highly reactive particles that we don't really understand, going to places in the body where particles have never been able to go before. These are very straightforward safety questions.

And then of course nano-particles are just the first wave of nanotech products. The industry is now moving towards devices, like nano-sensors and nano-computers, and the next stage would be to combine nanotech with biotechnology and rewire life on the nano-scale. If we can treat DNA as a molecule to be manipulated atom by atom, we're looking at nanotechnologically-enhanced living organisms, which is today a real possibility. This introduces a whole other set of concerns, from ethics to bio-safety. Derxler's projections created the famous out-of-control scenario called “grey goo”, whereby little molecular machines replicate themselves exponentially and destroy the planet. That's probably not going to happen, but what may well happen is “green goo” - where organisms modified on the nano-level go out of control.

Is there any institutional awareness of these hazards?

The only institutional response to nanotech so far has been massive commitment and encouragement, like we saw with biotechnology. Nanotech is getting the largest amount of government funding for a scientific program since the space race. The US government has the National Nanotechnology Initiative, which puts around a billion dollars per year into research to speed up the birth of the nanotech industry. The European “Framework Six” research program lists it as one of its key areas. Here in the UK, science minister Lord Sainsbury just gave another 90 million to nanotech research and development. All these programs are very focused on the market and building businesses, not on looking at the risks, the environmental and social impacts in particular - these are basically off the radar. It's only in the last year that the Environmental Protection Agency in the US, and the Health and Safety Executive here in the UK, have begun to notice that there may be some issues there.

So where is all this money going? Who benefits from nanotechnology?

The interesting thing about nanotech is that it is being applied across every single area of production. So if you look at the companies that are developing nanotech, they are almost literally all of the the Fortune 500 list. So you have nanotech being developed in a big way for computers and electronics by IBM and NEC, for agriculture by corporations like Kraft and Nestlé and Unilever, as well as Bayer who we are familiar with from the GM industry. You have nanotech in energy, working on things like solar cells and turning coal into oil. Finally, you have a lot of work on nanotech in the military, and that's probably one of the largest areas, so companies like Lockheed Martin or its associate Sandia are heavily involved. The US military in fact takes the lion's share of US funding for nanotech, and of course we don't know what a lot of that is going into.

The usual suspects, then.

Yes. But since nanotech has such a wide variety of usage, the patenting of artificial molecules also becomes a huge issue. What we're seeing at the moment is somewhere in the region of one to two thousand patents a year being granted on nano technologies. Like genetic engineering, one of the things driving nanotech profits is the ability to take out key patents on the nano-scale. In genetic engineering and biotechnology we saw that key patents were used across pharmaceuticals and simultaneously on agriculture, so we had a convergence of these two areas in what's called life sciences. So suddenly the same companies controlling pharmaceuticals - health - were controlling agriculture - food, both areas which are key to society. Because of genetics we already have an international movement saying “no patents on life” - but that's outdated now; we're looking at patents on matter itself. With nanotech, the same companies will use patents across five or six or eight different areas. IBM and NEC claim they have the key patenting on nano-tubes. Carbon nano-tubes will be used for computing, but also for pharmaceuticals, stronger materials and electricity. So this means that IBM for example is no longer a computing company, it's also a pharmaceuticals company, a materials company and so forth, it has immense power right across several industrial sectors. Monopoly rules are not ready to deal with that. Monopoly rules think about how companies come to dominate one or another sector, but nanotech will create domination across all sectors.

You mentioned military uses. Are there any nanotech projects that directly imply social control?

The most obvious one is the massive amount of work and money going into nano-sensors. Part of that is developing nano-sensors that can be put in the body, measuring your levels of glucose and so on. That's being developed by pharmaceuticals companies so that drugs can be deposited in the body in advance and released when they're needed, so if you're diabetic you don't need to remember to take your insulin. However, a lot of sensor research is being driven by so-called “homeland security”. The US government has a program called Sensornet, for which they have put aside three billion dollars, to develop a network of sensors all across the US, which will pick up radiological or biological threats. Of course in some ways that's trying to assure the safety of the nation, but we also know that homeland security in the US is a bit of a stalking horse for widespread surveillance. There was a project called “smart dust” run by DARPA, the central research body for the US Department of Defence. They were working in Berkeley university to develop tiny sensors, 1mm cube in size. These sensors would be able to sense a variety of environmental conditions, such as movement or light or sound. They would be entirely self-sustaining, for example with solar power, and would be able to turn themselves on, recognise other sensors in the vicinity, and create a wireless network among themselves. So you could spread a net of sensors on a battlefield, and then send the information back to a central command. At this stage they've gotten these sensors down to the size of a penny, but the potential for making them even smaller is clearly there. With small enough sensors and big enough computers to manage the data, you can literally throw a net over an entire city and know what everybody is doing all the time. Sensors can be used in lots of other areas as well. The US Department of Agriculture has a project which they call Little Brother, to put nitrogen or water sensors in fields, so farmers will not be needed for that job, and there's also talk of putting sensors on electricity pylons to replace electricity workers.

So this also has a huge potential impact on labour?

In the ETC group we think the biggest issue is what nanotech is going to mean for the poor, the developing countries, for small farmers and the disadvantaged. If you look historically at new waves of technology - and nanotech is probably the biggest, widest, most serious technology wave we've ever seen - you see that they tend not to benefit the poor. What happens with a new technology wave is that the rich see it coming, shape it, and “ride the wave” by seizing the opportunities involved. The poor don't see it coming on the whole, they can't adapt to the new skills and materials that the new technology requires, and usually get caught in the turbulence. A new technological wave shapes most people's lives without them having any say on it. Nanotech is being developed almost entirely in the North, there's a race at the moment between the US, Japan and Europe, and Australia, China and Korea are also participating. But it's certainly irrelevant at the moment for places like Africa, who haven't got the capacity to develop nano-science and nanotechnology. It's a very expensive technology to use - in order to see the nanotech world you need powerful atomic-force microscopes that can cost a million pounds each. But look at the agenda that is being pushed by using nanotech, in every single area: it's about invasive and monopolistic economical systems.

Very simply, any powerful technology that is brought into an unjust society will exacerbate the inequalities in that society. Could you conceivably have nanotech in a just society? Maybe. But in reality this is not a just society, and the technology is going to be controlled by the very people who perpetuate this injustice. The focus of most nanotechnology is to create products that will create profits for large corporations.

And you can see specific problems. Carbon nano-tubes are going to immediately worry countries that depend on the steel industry, but they also conduct electricity far better than copper. Copper is at the moment generally from places like Peru, Bolivia and Zambia. In Mongolia, Rio Tinto is about to open the third largest copper mine in the world in the Gobi desert. Now it takes about 15 years to get a copper mine up and running, and the assumption is that there's going to be a market at the end of that. Meanwhile Mitsubishi in Japan is producing multi tonne quantities of nano-tubes, and the patents are owned by NEC. What this means is that in a very short time the livelihoods of Zambian copper miners, or in the case of Mongolia a whole sector of the economy that they're expecting to depend on, is going to be irrelevant. Now copper mines are not an environmentally friendly thing, but this is going to be a massive destabilising factor on the economies of some of the poorest countries in the world, and they've got no say over it.

Another example is rubber. There's a lot of nanotech research to replace rubber with nano-clay or what's called “aero-gels”, or to make it last longer with carbon nano-tubes. Recently I was in Malaysia, the second largest rubber producer in the world, and I was talking to someone from the forestry industry. He said Malaysia is now investing massively in new rubber plantations, because it expects to benefit from the boom in the Chinese car industry. Again, it takes about ten years for a rubber tree to grow until you can sap it, and in ten years we probably won't need rubber. Now clearly rubber-tappers don't have a great life and more cars isn't a great idea either, but the point is that there's going to be a disruption in people's livelihoods, and that needs to be considered.

What is ETC doing at the moment in its campaigning?

At the moment the ETC group is one of the very few organisation worldwide that are taking a critical perspective on nanotech. And a lot of what we're doing is talking to other people and raising their awareness. We work a lot with civil society groups, particularly in the developing world, and do a lot of seminars and workshops in places like South America, Southern Africa and Southeast Asia. We also do research to produce analysis and information on what nanotechnology means for small farmers, for the disadvantaged.

We've called for a moratorium on all nanotech research in the laboratory, because there are currently no laboratory protocols for dealing with nano-particles. We know how toxic and invasive these particles are, but every day researchers and scientists are working with them without having any safety directions. We talked with researchers in South Africa and they say they handle nano-particles as though they were handling the Ebola virus, while researchers in France say “well, you know, sometimes we wear gloves”.

But what about the things that are already on the market?

Here again we are totally without any regulations. There was recently a report by Swiss Re, the second largest insurance company in the world, looking at the health and toxicity questions of nano-particles and their implications for insurance. Their conclusion is that this looks very similar to the case of asbestos, it's the same sort of exposure that people are opening themselves up to. Now this means that cosmetic companies like L'Oréal, for example, who have a lot of cosmetics that use “nanosomes” to transport their active ingredients through the skin, are in a very precarious place where insurance is concerned. But they had said the same thing about biotechnology, and then the companies internally insured these products, as well as engineering regulations saying they're not liable. So there are still no liability regulations for GM crops or GM foods, thirty years after the first experiments - to say nothing of nanotech. At the moment we have no regulations anywhere in the world dealing with nanotechnology, risks or societal issues.

On the United Nations level we've been talking about something more far reaching. What we're saying is we need international fora that are able to control all these emerging technologies which nanotech enables. Biotechnology and information technology and neuro-engineering will all become much more powerful, and different, when they are taken to the nano-scale. So we'd like to see an “international convention for evaluating new technologies”. The idea is that there should be an international body of some sort which is able to scan what new and emerging technologies are coming through, and which ones are going to have potential environmental or social implications, and then to slow them down, to put them through a social assessment protocol.

All this sound a pretty difficult to achieve. The industry is moving very fast, and we've seen how ineffective regulation bodies are - for example with climate change.

Absolutely - the kind of politics required for that isn't in place now. The only thing we currently have is the notion that technology is good for development and the economy, and we need more of it, as well as to patent and control it privately. It's going to take probably a decade before we have the type of international politics of technology that can make it happen. On the other hand, the financial predictions are that by 2011 the nanotech industry will be worth a trillion dollars, making it possibly the most powerful industry in the whole wide world. Ian Pearson, who is British Telecom's “official futurologist”, has predicted that by that time, the churn of change introduced by nanotech convergence products will be so great, that there will be massive international anti-technology movements. Now that's what BT themselves assume; that's to say, the amount of displacement, ecological and economic effects, the power of corporations and especially things like sensors and surveillance, are all going to generate massive conflicts. Now either we just go to that conflict, which means a lot of pain and destruction, or you try to put in place some kind of international process for putting new technology under democratic control. For such a process to really work, it would have to be responsive to the needs of the poorest and the most disadvantaged, as well as indigenous cultures, farmers, women, the disabled.

Corporate Watch is currently launching a new project to map the nanotechnology industry, and providing campaigners with individual corporate targets.