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“The Ennobling Unity of Science and Technology”: Materials Sciences and Engineering, the Department of Energy, and the Nanotechnology Enigma

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Abstract

The ambiguous material identity of nanotechnology is a minor mystery of the history of contemporary science. This paper argues that nanotechnology functioned primarily in discourses of social, not physical or biological science, the problematic knowledge at stake concerning the economic value of state-supported basic science. The politics of taxonomy in the United States Department of Energy’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences in the 1990s reveals how scientists invoked the term as one of several competing and equally valid candidates for reframing materials sciences in ways believed consonant with the political tenor of the time. The resulting loss of conceptual clarity in the sociology of science traces ultimately to the struggle to bridge the disjunction between the promissory economy of federal basic science and the industrial economy, manifested in attempts to reconcile the precepts of linearity and interdisciplinarity in changing socio-economic conditions over a half century.

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Notes

  1. “Minutes of the 24-25 February 1999 Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (BESAC) Meeting,” Richard E. Smalley Papers, box 32 folder 3, Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia PA (hereafter cited as Smalley TS-CHF).

  2. McCray introduced the term “hidden histories” as a means of problematizing the standard origin stories of nanotechnology. Mody coined a similar expression for a conference dedicated to this subject; see “Nano Before There Was Nano: Historical Perspectives on the Constituent Communities of Nanotechnology,” 2005 Cain Conference Chemical Heritage Foundation, 19 March 2005; http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-sci-med-tech&month=0409&week=d&msg=hFNryYz1f5X9UIu2TfFiig&user=&pw=. Accessed 23 June 2011.

  3. Those leaning toward change have included Rosenberg (1994), Guston (2000), Ziman (2000), Mirowski (2002, 2004, 2011), Mirowski and Sent (2008), Forman (2007), and Jones (2011). Those leaning towards continuity have included Kleinman (1995), Greenberg (2001, 2007), Mowery (1998), Mowery et al. (2001), Mowery and Ziedonis (2002), Mowery et al. (2004), Godin (2006, 2008), and Shapin (2008).

  4. If one accepts that knowledge is context-rooted, it follows that attempts to privatize science in these realms will not be unproblematic and, moreover, will yield different results in different fields. Nelson held that only in the biotechnology sector have prototype technologies been regarded as an important output of academic research. In electronics, the academy has tended to follow developments in industry (see, for example, Lécuyer 2005). Of course, intensive patenting of academic research may have important implications for research and teaching. But even in the most strongly entrepreneurial of academic life sciences, note some science studies analysts, market relations have not displaced traditional disciplinary relations, despite the hybridization of practice (Vallas and Kleinman 2008, pp. 302-307; Lam 2010, p. 334).

  5. Habermas defined strategic language as symbolic and figurative usage parasitic on everyday problem-solving communicative functions. Its effect, as summarized by Cooke, is to “suspend the idealizing suppositions…of consistency of meaning or a shared orientation toward mutual understanding” (1998, p. 15).

  6. Science alliances were relatively common by this time, as Westfall notes. In the 1960s and 1970s, the astronomy community united in lobbying for construction of a space telescope (Smith 1989) and a coalition of high-energy particle physicists and nuclear physicists enabled the construction of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven in the 1980s (Crease 2008).

  7. Patricia Dehmer, “Minutes of the 24-25 February 1999 Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (BESAC) Meeting,” p. 3.

  8. See, for example, Safire (1993).

  9. House hearing on the Department of Energy national laboratories, FYI: The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Science Policy News 124 (8 September 1995); http://www.aip.org/fyi/1995/fyi95.124.htm. Accessed 15 November 2010.

  10. House appropriations subcommittee considers cutting DOE, FYI: The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Science Policy News 10 (24 January 1995); http://www.aip.org/fyi/1995/fyi95.010.htm. Accessed 14 November 2010.

  11. Martha Krebs, assistant secretary of energy research in the DOE's Office of Energy Research, reported that the energy agency remained operational due to carry-over funds and the fact Clinton had signed the Energy and Water Development Appropriations bill on 31 November 1995 (1996, 12).

  12. NSF director Lane: “Understanding the issues and entering the fray,” FYI: The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Science Policy News 96 (7 July 1995). http://www.aip.org/fyi/1995/fyi95.096. Accessed 15 November 2010.

  13. NSF director Neal Lane on government shutdown, FYI: The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Science Policy News 8 (19 January 1996), http://www.aip.org/fyi/1996/fyi96.008.htm. Accessed 14 November 2010; NSF director Neal Lane on science funding outlook, role of scientists, FYI: The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Science Policy News 9 (22 January 1996), http://www.aip.org/fyi/1996/fyi96.009.htm. Accessed 14 November 2010.

  14. Of its 16 members, six (Venkatesh Narayanamurti, Gabriel Aeppli, J. Murray Gibson, Cherry A. Murray, Paul S. Peercy, and Julia M. Phillips) had links with Bell Labs and three (James B. Roberto, Arthur Bienenstock and Phillips) were employed at national laboratories. Of the 16 members of the supporting Solid State Committee, seven had connections to Bell Labs, eleven had worked in industry at some point, and four were managers at national labs.

  15. “Minutes of the 24-25 February 1999 Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (BESAC) Meeting,” p. 4.

  16. This distinction was also sometimes hazy in the science studies literature. For example, Crease held that the experiment hall of the National Synchrotron Light Source was itself a site of interdisciplinary collaboration without discussing the ways researchers interacted with each other (2010, pp. 79-80).

  17. FY 1996 budget request: Department of Energy-fundamental science, FYI: The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Science Policy News 23 (10 February 1995); http://www.aip.org/fyi/1995/fyi95.023.htm. Accessed 15 November 2010.

  18. In fiscal year 1993, Energy Biosciences constituted only around three percent ($25.4 million) of the $837 million BES budget; see Congressional Budget 1995 BES (pp. 476, 501).

  19. “Minutes of the 24-25 February 1999 Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (BESAC) Meeting,” pp. 5, 14. Marvin Cassman, director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, did note in the February 1999 meeting of BESAC that the NIH had already agreed to contribute $18.5 million for upgrades to the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory and the National Synchrotron Light Source.

  20. Congressional Budget 1998 BES, p. 439.

  21. American Physical Society, Division of Condensed-Matter Physics, http://www.aps.org/units/dcmp/governance/history.cfm. Accessed 9 February 2012.

  22. Congressional Budget 2000 BES, pp. 12, 17; Congressional Budget 2001 BES, p. 23.

  23. Congressional Budget 1999 BES, p. 16.

  24. “Minutes of the 24-25 February 1999 Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (BESAC) Meeting,” p. 12.

  25. Ibid., p. 2.

  26. The centerpiece of this strategy was the Climate Change Technology Initiative (Simpson 2001, pp. 1–2), which resembled the PNGV in that it was a multi-agency effort supporting work that in some cases consisted of relabeled extant programs.

  27. “Minutes of the 24-25 February 1999 Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (BESAC) Meeting,” pp. 19-21.

  28. Testimony of Dr. Neal Lane, Director, National Science Foundation, before the House Basic Research Subcommittee, 22 April 1998.

  29. “Minutes for the Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee Meeting, 3-4 November 1999,” box 33, folder 9 (Smalley TS-CHF).

  30. “Minutes for the Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee Meeting, 10-11 August 1999,” box 32, folder 1, pp. 19-21 (Smalley TS-CHF).

  31. Krebs opened the LBNL workshop in March 1999 by citing the example of a virus to challenge her definition of life, claiming that artificial life was ‘the apex of nanotechnology’; Alan J. Hurd, e-mail communication with author, 1 May 2011.

  32. “‘Nano’ Impacts Science Broadly: Examples of Research Supported by BES – Highlighted Topics are Impacted by Nano-Science, Engineering, and Technology,” box 33, folder 9 (Smalley TS-CHF). Basic Energy Sciences even based its official logo on an orientation diagram of C60, obtained, in an underscoring of the concerns of the U.S. neutron community, at the UK’s ISIS neutron and muon source. The DOE had been intimately involved in the discovery of fullerenes and the career of the man who by then had become one of the chief tribunes of nanotechnology. The department had provided Smalley with equipment enabling his cluster research including lasers as far back as 1979-1980 and had supported the development of the AP2 device used to discover the first buckyball (Hopkins et al. 1980; Aldersey-Williams 1995; Kroto et al. 1985).

  33. “Minutes for the Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee Meeting, 3-4 November 1999.”

  34. I derive this idea from Nordmann, who spoke of how the “mismatch” between orthodox ideals of materials science as a province of research where properties of matter were explained in terms of defects (as opposed to orthodox ideals of solid-state physics, where phenomena were explained in terms of perfect crystals) and the notion of precise characterization, control, and finely fabricated devices increasingly associated with nanotechnology by the early 1990s helped determine who was written in or out of the historical record as a founder of the latter (2009, pp. 123-125, 140-141).

  35. “Minutes for the Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee Meeting, 10-11 August 1999,” p. 21-22. Several BESAC members drew tongue-in-cheek social analogies from nanoscale phenomena, recommending the ‘spontaneous formation’ or ‘human self-assembly’ of ‘interdisciplinary cells’; pp. 5-6, 21.

  36. “Minutes for the Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee Meeting, 3-4 November 1999,” p. 15-22.

  37. Dehmer to Smalley, 6 November 1999, box 57, folder 8 (Smalley TS-CHF).

  38. “Minutes for the Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee Meeting, 10-11 August 1999,” p. 7.

  39. Dehmer to Smalley, Smalley to Dehmer, 8 November 1999, box 57, folder 8 (Smalley TS-CHF).

  40. Aggregate federal funding of basic research, including money spent in government labs, industry, federally-funded research and development centers, universities, nonprofits, and non-profit FFRDCs nearly doubled between 1990 and 2008 from around $17 billion to over $32 billion in constant 2000 dollars, with the federal government investing a total of around $248 billion between 2001 and 2008 (NSB 2010, Appendix table 4-8).

  41. See congressional budgets, BES, 2000-2013.

  42. For example, industrial users made up only 3, 3, and 5.6 percent of total users at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies during the facility’s first three years of operation at the Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories (6 of 189 in 2007, 8 of 272 in 2008, and 20 of 354 in 2009) (Kippen et al. 2010, p. 11). In 2010, only 11 percent of users at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Molecular Foundry were from industry; the vast majority (64 percent) were academicians. I thank David A. Bunzow, Molecular Foundry user facility manager, for providing this data.

  43. The exception, noted one national laboratory manager, was neutron scattering, which did attract big chip manufacturers around mid-decade as a way of simulating the effects of cosmic ray bombardment on commercial electronics; Alan J. Hurd, conversation with the author, 10 August 2010.

  44. In an influential 2007 report, a National Academies committee observed that the Bell Labs model was no longer relevant to the organization of science and engineering in the U.S., based as it was on a since-dismantled monopoly (Augustine et al. 2007, p. 84). Two years later, in testimony to the Senate Committee on Appropriations, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, one of the authors of the 2007 report and a Bell Labs alumnus, promoted university-based and federal “Energy Innovation Hubs” as “Bell Lablets” (Chu 2009, p. 3).

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Acknowledgments

This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under SES 0531184 and 0938099. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. I am grateful to the archivists at the Chemical Heritage Foundation and the Fondren Library at Rice University for their invaluable assistance. I thank David A. Bunzow, Hyungsub Choi, Gwen D’Arcangelis, Barbara Herr Harthorn, Alan J. Hurd, Frederick Klaessig, Bruce Lewenstein, W. Patrick McCray, Cyrus C.M. Mody, Yasuyuki Motoyama, Catherine Westfall, Peter Westwick, and several anonymous referees for their critical insight and suggestions.

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  1. Department of Engineering and Society, School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Virginia, Box 400744, 351 McCormick Road, A237 Thornton Hall, Charlottesville, VA, 22904, USA

    Matthew N. Eisler

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Eisler, M.N. “The Ennobling Unity of Science and Technology”: Materials Sciences and Engineering, the Department of Energy, and the Nanotechnology Enigma. Minerva 51, 225–251 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-013-9224-z

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