Five years ago, the first issue of the journal Nature Nanotechnology was published. Chris Toumey asks, in this article, what progress has been made in efforts to engage the public in decisions about nanotechnology since that first issue. In that first issue, he described the idea of “democratizing science”, which he defines as a “state of affairs in which non-experts have active and constructive roles in science policy decisions.” The thought at the time was that nanotechnology would become a laboratory for experimenting with the idea of democratizing science. Toumey writes: “If democratizing science is going to happen, and especially if it is going to become standard practice in the formulation of science policy, then it needs to navigate a course between two undesirable options. First, we do not want science policy determined by political values that disregard scientific knowledge…Second, we want to avoid forcing science policy on a population that resents it, even if the policy is grounded in good scientific knowledge…This is an eye of a needle that is difficult to thread: avoid decisions based on pseudoscience, but also avoid decisions that come from undemocratic processes. Where are we now, five years later?” Toumey asks various experts in the field for their opinions on his question, and outlines their responses in five detailed observations. He concludes that “Even though public engagement with nanotechnology is less than what we hoped it would be by now, and even though nanotechnology is an extremely difficult test case for democratizing science, it is still one of the best laboratories we have for creating ways for non-experts to have active and constructive roles in science policy decision processes.”
http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v6/n10/full/nnano.2011.168.html