The corporate launch of GM foods and crops involved a ruthless global battle plan in which the public were seen as an enemy to be bypassed or defeated. The plan worked flawlessly for a few years then backfired catastrophically from 1998 onwards. Representatives of the industry took over all the governmental and intergovernmental regulatory bodies - including, in the USA, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the post of Secretary of Agriculture and, in the UK, the Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes and the Royal Society - to name but a few. Vast sums were invested in PR consultants, political lobbyists and lawyers - Monsanto has more of each than most Third World nations.

GM crops were quietly approved by these committees in response to secret safety data provided by the applicant corporations. In the absence of any independent or Government safety research, GM foods were deemed 'substantially equivalent' to conventional foods. These same committees watered down or waived inconvenient safety regulations and application procedures. When consumers around the world heard about these products that offered them no benefits and found out that they had no access to any independent safety data they demanded a moratorium and stopped buying the products. The dodgy deals and webs of complicity and deceit were revealed in a global blaze of publicity. The market collapsed within months. The Wall Street Journal last year reported that in the last two decades the global biotech industry has invested around US$100 billion - and that the cumulative loss to investors in that period is believed to be at least US$40 billion. Only in the USA (where corporate influence over the mass media and a ban on GM labelling means that most Americans don't even know what they're eating) are there still any significant sales of GM foods. Research on GM fruit and vegetables has rapidly declined. Only four nations - the USA, Canada, Argentina and Brazil - still grow significant GM food crops - mainly for animal feed.

Amongst academic and public sector biotechnologists there is a lot of anger about how the corporations mishandled the affair - especially the unrealistic hype about its benefits, the reality of profit-oriented rather than socially beneficial applications, the almost total secrecy and the commodification of knowledge through patenting. A 2002 report from the Nuffield Foundation concludes that patenting gene sequences creates major obstacles to independent biotechnology research. Dr Richard Jefferson, the founder of the agricultural life science institute CAMBIA and advocate of "open source genetics", calls for a "democratisation of innovation". On genetic patenting he says "In the case of almost every single enabling technology, the corporations have acquired it from the public sector. They have the morals of stoats."

Better luck with nanotech?
The 'nanotech revolution' is a few years behind the 'biotech revolution', but is approaching rapidly. Like biotech and all previous technologies, nanotech is being hyped as a panacea that will allow the lame to walk and the blind to see - an end to disease and poverty and war and promises of unlimited food and energy. Past experience of the agricultural, industrial, electrical, nuclear, computer and biotech revolutions allow us to hazard a guess at the more likely outcome - it will offer a wide range of modest benefits to those who can afford them, put a lot of poorer people using older technologies temporarily out of work, create some unpredicted and possibly serious environmental hazards, make a handful of entrepreneurs unimaginably rich, and bankrupt a lot of overoptimistic investors. To maximise the benefits and minimise the harm to themselves and their environment, the public will need to ensure before the revolution that they are in control of it.

The development of nanotechnology so far may be going somewhat more smoothly than the development of biotechnology, but it is too early to tell whether the same mistakes will be made. One example concerns nanoparticles such as those used in some suncreams. These ultra-fine particles of zinc oxide and titanium dioxide allow suncreams to be transparent, whilst the old coarser-grained particles made them opaque white. For a few years the US and EU regulatory bodies treated nanoparticles as 'substantially equivalent' to the normal chemical - that had already been safety tested. Research however had suggested that the nanoparticles were far more chemically reactive and more easily passed through cell walls. In the last year, bodies such as Britain's Royal Society have recommended, for example, that ultra-finely powdered chemicals - nanoparticles - are treated as new substances for the purpose of toxicity testing. We will soon discover whether the UK Government has listened to this advice.

Regulatory bodies currently appear to be engaging in some discussions with civil society bodies to develop publicly accepted safety standards and assessment procedures before the corrupting influences of infiltration, litigation, PR and political donations have had too pernicious an influence. But is such apparent consultation just a more sophisticated PR exercise? Scientists have pointed out safety issues with nanoparticles and have not (yet) been silenced, sacked and denounced in the way GM safety researchers were. The nanotech industry's development may appear somewhat slower and steadier, but whilst it has the potential to develop with greater openness and public acceptance there is no guarantee that it will. Indeed, the expanding involvement in nanotech of the PR organisations brought in to defend GM crops (Lexington, Burson Marsteller and the Science Media Centre for example) suggests that some in the industry are preparing for conflict.

Whose technology is it anyway?
What civil society - that's you and me and all those informal groups we join to help get our views heard - wants is openness and prior informed consent when it comes to new technologies. The development of scientific understanding of how the world works is, in itself, a good thing - but we have learned since the industrial revolution, and especially in recent decades, that almost any practical technology can be used or abused by the institutions that control it. With any new technology we have come to expect that that inseparable trinity, the Government, the Corporations and the Military, will try to rush ahead irresponsibly in the interests of the economy, the shareholders or defense until the public loudly demand that issues such as health, safety and the environment should also be taken into account.

Globalisation and the accompanying world trade rules have led to the rapid merger of corporations worldwide and the emergence of a few global monopolies or oligarchies in each technological sphere. This has also created a situation where nations have to compete for the patronage of these monopolies by offering the most conducive 'environment for investment'. In practice this means nations try to eliminate regulations on pollution, health, employees rights etc faster and more substantially than their competitors - in what has been called 'the race to the bottom'. They are also forced to invest in and subsidise the industries most likely to pay off national debts rather than in the technologies likely to benefit the most needy citizens. With globalisation Governments cease to represent their citizens and instead effectively become servants of the corporations.

This clash of interests is not inevitable. An orderly and beneficial development of new technologies requires a constructive partnership between the innovators, Government and the public. Businesses should have incentives to compete to develop and market products desired by society, to develop the technology in a socially desired direction and in accordance with with an accepted regulatory framework. The public should be able to feel that they can trust the technology to develop without threatening health, safety, privacy or the environment. People should not fear that they may have to rush out and strangle nanotechnology at birth - as they did with GM foods.

The nanotech industry is currently tiny in comparison with its projected future size - the US National Science Foundation estimates the market will be worth a million million dollars by 2011 but it is currently only worth 800 or 900 million dollars. Now is the time to sort out all these issues, for everyone's benefit, before the cost of doing so becomes too high. Canada's ETC group is demanding a moratorium on the industry until an accountable regulatory and safety regime has been set up and until the creation of an 'International Convention for the Evaluation of New Technologies'.

Many changes are needed to tackle this problem. Corporate monopoly has long been recognised as a serious obstacle to enterprise. There is little difference between a private monopoly and a nationalised industry - both eliminate accountability, choice and the incentive to improve provided by competition. The process of global corporate merger has rightly been called 'communism by the back door'. A procedure is required to break up global monopolies similar to that used by many nations to break up national monopolies.

Civil society involvement in the creation of a regulatory regime and independent safety tests is another necessary step - as is public access to safety test data.

An open source approach
The third step that could greatly improve the situation is to restrict the commodification and privatisation of knowledge. Open source software is beginning to make a contribution to the world of nanotechnology. Molecular modelling design software, such as NanoCAD - originally released under the GPL - and successors, has been around for a decade. Public (ie non-corporate) access to hardware for actual molecular engineering is not yet a reality although affordable scanning tunneling microscopes are in the pipeline - possibly to be followed by atomic force microscopes.

An Open Source approach to regulation could be applied to complex nanoparticles themselves to replace the current regime of secrecy. This would involve free redistribution of the structure and method of engineering of each design of nanoparticle -including the software required for its manufacture - in accordance with a GPL. Others could improve or modify the nanoparticle design on condition that it also carried the GPL. To be effective such an approach would not just need to encourage an Open Source approach, it would require a ban on traditional patents and on DURTS (Digital Use Restriction Technologies) and, of course, on global corporate monopolies.

Encouragingly, from the virtual birth of the nanotech world, Karl E. Drexler and Christine Peterson's rather techno-utopian Foresight Institute has promoted an Open Source approach - an approach only belatedly promoted in the biotech world by Richard Jefferson's CAMBIA.

The benefits for both innovation and accountability are clear. The Open Source approach would create an intellectual commons in the nanotech world - where all researchers had full access to existing discoveries and inventions. This can be thought of as changing the competition between companies from a battle for exclusive ownership of costly private knowledge into a race to use free public knowledge most profitably. The latter is more economically beneficial for all - so there is no economic case for secrecy.

The technology could be accessed by developing nations and by charitable and public bodies that could not afford to pay market prices for use of patented knowledge (ignoring the problem of where they will obtain the million dollar electron microscopes they will need) thus possibly reducing the growth of social inequality that often accompanies technological revolutions. Of course the promises of purely technical fixes for problems caused by social injustice, inequality and landlessness are mirages - and just making a technology Open Source will not solve them. Most technological aid to developing nations for agriculture, for example, has helped wealthy landowners at the expense of landless labourers.

An Open Source approach could allow anyone with adequate understanding to evaluate the safety of products in commercial use, to repeat the safety tests used for their approval and to recommend necessary or desirable improvements.

But there is now a reason why all this might well not happen...

The secret war
The "phoney war" that the US Government has initiated since 9/11, with its accompanying and carefully cultivated climate of fear, has massively increased the risk of the creation of "nanoweapons" and other dangerous applications of nanotechnology - and has imposed a climate of secrecy over the industry. Not only has 9/11 been used to justify the rejection of international law, the UN and the Geneva Convention, it has also been used to dismiss the non-proliferation treaties. Much of this agenda is revealed through the "Project for the New American Century" - the neo-conservative think-tank set up by Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush and others to promote an ideology of total US world domination through the use of force. America is now pouring massive funding into a chemical and biological weapons program that it had already relaunched before 9/11 - as documented by the Sunshine Project and others.

Genetic engineering has been used to develop more potent strains of Anthrax, Brucellosis, Glanders, Bubonic Plague, Melioidosis and Tularemia. The existence of the weapon-grade anthrax and its potential danger to the public came to light in the most dramatic of ways only days after 9/11. The creation of these weapons is now being justified using the oldest alibi in the book - they are supposedly being created in order to discover how enemies could create them and to develop appropriate defences against them. If the University of Tehran had carried out such defensive bioweapons research it would, of course, have been flattened by now.

Genetic engineering in the US now proceeds under much increased secrecy - to ensure that "the enemy" do not obtain the technology. It is reasonable to assume that other sectors of US science are being increasingly clouded in secrecy to enable the development of cyber-weapons and nano-weapons. Of course one absurdity of all this is that "the enemy" have neither the technology nor the money to develop such weapons from scratch (Saddam proved to have neither the weapons nor the missiles to deliver them around the world) - their only hope is to obtain the technique ready-made from the one nation that does have the technology and the money. The only biological terror attack in the US involved the use of US military-grade anthrax developed in the name of defence. If genetically modified bubonic plague or a cloud of toxic nanoparticles engulfs America it will not have been created in a cave in Afghanistan - it will have been stolen from an American lab or have been accidentally released from one.

It should make no sense to the Military to use terrorism to justify general scientific secrecy. As argued above, general scientific secrecy should make no economic sense for Corporations either. But does it make sense for that third party in the inseparable trinity - the Government? Governments currently enforce strict patent laws in order to create that attractive 'environment for investment' so that the Corporations will relocate business to their nation.

Getting to global openness
Under the current regime of 'globalisation' nations cannot push an Open Source approach to nanotech - or to any other technology - unless their 'competitor' nations do so simultaneously. Civil society needs to find a way to press for this. One such strategy is the 'Simultaneous Policy' developed by John Bunzl's International Simultaneous Policy Organisation. This could also be used to press Governments to simultaneously implement an 'International Convention for the Evaluation of New Technologies' covering nanotechnology, biotechnology and every other emerging sector. The Foresight (2000)

Guidelines recommend that: "Governments, companies, and individuals who refuse or fail to follow responsible principles and guidelines for development and dissemination of MNT should, if possible, be placed at a competitive disadvantage with respect to access to MNT intellectual property, technology, and markets." Any such developments towards international scientific openness and public accountability would require a restoration of the authority of the UN and of the badly battered concept of international law.

Uses and abuses of nanotechnology
Ivan Illich, the social critic and Jesuit priest, in his 1973 classic "Tools for Conviviality" argued that tools and technologies should be evaluated on the basis of their 'conviviality'. Did they empower their users or disempower them? Could they be modified and repaired by anyone? Did they facilitate liberty, equality and fraternity or dependency, inequality and social isolation? Did they benefit or harm the users' society and environment? His examples of tools and technologies for conviviality included telephones, bicycles and skills exchanges - nowdays he would presumably have included Linux, email and IRC. Unconvivial tools included cars, compulsory schooling and television - and now, presumably, AOL and Windows XP.

Using such criteria we can begin to discern what applications of nanotechnology should be encouraged or rejected. Cheaper solar panels - using coatings of nanoparticles -are one potential winner. The possibility of everyone being able to produce their own energy and break free of their dependency on Exxon and General Electric is appealing - as long as those nanoparticles are non-toxic. Likewise nanoceramics potentially could be used to make cheap, eco-friendly, rechargeable batteries that last forever - but they'll only be cheap if no-one patents them and so gains a monopoly on their sale. Nano-encapsulated drugs, on the other hand, even if they proved safe, would inevitably remain the territory of pharmaceutical monopolies and so undermine further our capacity to independently manage our own health.

Creating alternative futures
The Neo-liberal economist believes that our social and technological development is determined by the 'hidden hand' of market forces; the Marxist, in a disconcertingly similar fashion, sees a dialectical process driving society towards an inevitable Goal. The Social Darwinist believes that our social development is determined by the survival of the fittest - and many in the scientific community believe in a technological determinism in which we adopt particular technologies, ever more advanced, in a virtually pre-ordained matter.

The concept of choice of direction and of social participation in such choices is virtually or entirely lacking from this entire range of social theories. In their various ways they all assume, for example, that the invention of devices such as the spinning jenny inevitable ushered in the factory system and the industrial revolution. Yet the small spinning jennies, that thousands of families hired and used at home to earn some additional income, did not require factories. The first factories were created because the hirers of the machines - who had a legal monopoly over their use - wanted the produce of a full day's non-stop work from each machine. The free peasants were forced into vast sheds to become permanently supervised employees - and thus were born the first factories.

It is interesting to imagine what direction society would have developed in if the spinning jenny was an open source technology and the devices were owned by their users. Instead of ever larger and more automated machines we might have seen the evolution of smaller and more advanced machines for the home production of textiles. We might have had economic development without urbanisation. How we develop is determined not by technology but by our social decisions about how technologies should be used. Just as there was a choice of alternative futures 200 years ago so there is now. When the technocrat tells us that be must 'accept progress' or face extinction they are merely appealing to the civil society to leave decisions about the direction of our progress to the Governmental, Corporate and Military 'experts'.

Nanotechnology is not a ready-made highway to the future, it is a growing bundle of both useful and dangerous tools that we can blindly embrace or reject or that we can carefully and democratically select from to create the future of our choosing.

References

Bill Joy: Why the future doesn't need us
www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html

BIOS: Biological Innovation for Open Society
www.bios.net

CAMBIA
www.cambia.org

ETC
www.etcgroup.org

Foresight Institute
www.foresight.org

PNAC: Project for the New American Century
www.newamericancentury.org

PNAC Primer
www.crisispapers.org/Editorials/PNAC-Primer.htm

Science Commons
http://science.creativecommons.org

The Simultaneous Policy
www.simpol.org