Whatever physical rules NBIC researchers come up with, whether and how they are used will be up to the rules set forth in public policy. Since there are precious few nanotechnology-based products on the market or even in late-stage development, it might seem that having an ethical discussion about them is premature. But Arthur Caplan can already identify several emerging ethical issues, and there are likely to be more. The best way to identify them and perhaps shape their outcome, he says, is to work closely with the people who are pushing the technology forward, such as NBIC researchers. “This is one of the first times we’ve got a handshake going on between bioethics and engineering,” Caplan says, adding that now is the time to get these issues squared away—before nanotechnology presents any real-life ethical dilemmas. “The best bioethics is prophylactic bioethics,” he says. He and his colleagues have already come up with several categories of ethical issues that the use of nanotechnology faces.

The first is dealing with the fear that some form of nanotechnology will somehow escape the bounds of the environment it was designed for and cause harm. In its most imaginative form, this is the scenario described in Michael Crichton’s recent science-fiction novel, Prey, in which a “grey goo” of self-replicating, nanometer-scale robots breed with abandon and turn on their creators. But Caplan and others do not see this as a serious threat. Even the coiner of the “grey goo” term, K. Eric Drexler, dismisses the danger. “Runaway replication would only be the product of a deliberate and difficult engineering process, not an accident,” he wrote in the August 2004 issue of the journal Nanotechnology. The popular identification of nanotechnology with grey goo is hurting public perception of the field and distracting attention from more serious and realistic safety concerns, Drexler added.

Nanotechnology does not have to crawl off and commit cold-blooded murder to be a danger. Although research on health effects of nanoscale materials is just getting started, some of the most promising nanoscale materials have been found to be harmful in certain situations. Two reports in 2004 stirred concern. One showed that high concentrations of carbon nanotubes can fatally stop up the lungs of rats. The other found that fullerenes, spherical carbon cages just a few nanometers across, tend to accumulate in fish brains. Nanotechnology industrialists, particularly those involved in manufacturing nanoscale materials, are concerned that more such studies could cause a public backlash. “It’s a bit like the worries about agricultural biotechnology,” notes Caplan. “Nanotech watched what happened to agricultural biotech and almost had a heart attack.”

Another ethical issue the NBIC is tracking is the question of whether the use of nanotechnology in our bodies will make us somehow less human, more like a cyborg. Already, people are volunteering to have rice-grain sized radio-frequency ID tags injected beneath their skin to serve as identification for calling up medical records or entering secure areas. Nanotechnology could make such devices much smaller and more intelligent. And what issues would arise about the expectation of privacy if such an unobtrusive device could be used to keep tabs on people without their knowledge?

There are also ethical issues associated with intellectual property rights. Caplan is concerned as to whether the public interest is best served by issuing patents describing broad science or technology or by issuing only narrow ones that leave the broad concepts in the public domain or even in government hands. At this early stage in the development of nanotechnology some very fundamental patents have already been assigned, though their impact is unclear. For instance, computing and software giant, IBM Corp., owns the U.S. composition of matter patent on the type of carbon nanotube most likely to make it into practical applications in electronics and materials.

“For IT you need desks and computers, for biotech you need wet labs, but for nanotech you need clean rooms,” he says. Found in microchip factories, the environment in a clean room is so tightly controlled that in the most advanced type only one particle of dust will be found for every cubic foot of air. On top of clean rooms, portions of the laboratory must be isolated from the imperceptible microscopic vibrations caused by the world outside.

It’s a demanding set of criteria. Bonnell points out that the particles in smoke are about 10,000 times bigger than some of the molecules NBIC scientists work with, and that the vibrations in her office in the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter building are just as comparatively enormous. “You don’t always have to have such control [for nanotechnology experiments] but your building has to accommodate it.”

So critical has nanotechnology become that she estimates 35-40 percent of research projects in applied physics and engineering requires the conditions the NBIC will provide. “[Nanotechnology] is not a flash-in-the-pan topic. It really represents the fundamental underpinning of a wide range of academic disciplines,” she says. And if the center produces the research she expects, Penn science and engineering will be the fundamental underpinnings of the nanotechnology era.

Samuel K. Moore is an associate editor with IEEE Spectrum Magazine and writes frequently on nanotechnology issues.