Nanotechnology

So is the public afraid of nanotechnology? No, they are not. The 1)............... findings that we have show that the public is still fairly neutral about nanotechnology, in part because little is known about it. So that’s where the public stands at the moment. I did work that looked at public willingness to use a new commercial product containing nanotechnology, and in fact I studied four different commercial products. One was a drug product, another was skin lotion, the third was automobile 2)............... containing nanotechnology, and a fourth was a refrigerator gas 3)............... containing nanotechnology, all of which were claimed to have both risks and benefits.

I just want to talk briefly about some results that we found from the Centre for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University. The current project scores how public perceptions match up, or don’t match up actually, with scientific 4)............... on nanotechnology. One of the most interesting findings is that nanotechnology may be one of the first emerging technologies where scientists are more concerned about some of the risks than the public, particularly in the areas of environment and human health. Another interesting finding is that, not surprisingly, scientists thought that nanotechnology was more useful for society and more morally acceptable than the public, but the need for regulation is pretty similar across the scientists and public. Their sense for the need for regulation in the nanotechnology area was quite similar, with only 22% of the public and 13% of scientists thinking that it was more important to advance nanotechnology quickly than to protect the public from unknown 5)..............., so pretty low numbers there. Then the last finding that I just want to emphasise is we asked scientists who had the highest level of expertise to communicate with the public about potential risks and 6)............... of nanotechnology. And their response was that they overwhelmingly supported university scientists. When we asked the public who they trusted most to actually communicate with them about the risks and benefits of nanotechnology, they trusted the university scientists the most. So we actually think this a policy-relevant finding, that university scientists don’t often 7)............... in this sort of dialogue with the public but they do seem to have high levels of trust from the public as well as high levels of expertise according to their 8)................

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