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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 225-251 |
| Number of pages | 27 |
| Journal | Minerva |
| Volume | 51 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| Early online date | 16 Apr 2013 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 30 Jun 2013 |
Funding
infrastructure projects and progress on new ones was slow. Biologists were demanding increased access to synchrotrons, yet operational support for these facilities came mainly from the DOE and National Science Foundation, not the National Institutes of Health, a sore spot for physical science communities resentful of the NIH’s growing dominance of federal resources. To be in the vanguard of science, held Iran L. Thomas, director of BES’s Division of Materials Science, the energy agency had to show how it benefited Americans.1 28 Testimony of Dr. Neal Lane, Director, National Science Foundation, before the House Basic Research Subcommittee, 22 April 1998. ‘‘‘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). 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.
Keywords
- complex systems
- condensed-matter physics
- department of energy
- federal science policy
- industrial laboratory
- materials sciences and engineering
- nanotechnology
- national laboratory