THE SCIENCE of very small things, nanotechnology, is still in its infancy but could revolutionise medicine, electronics and chemistry. This field of endeavour which involves making tiny components, often as small as one thousand millionth of a metre, could lead to advances from windows that repel dirt to the creation of speck-like medical robots that hunt down germs in the human body.

Given its vast possibilities, scientists ought to be looking forward to public discussion of this nascent science. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Many fear that discussion will be limited to the potential risks and dangers of nanotechnologies, and that this could impede or even halt the progress of the new science.

So far there are no indications that nanotechnologies will feature alongside pensions, the health service, terrorism or teenage sex in the concerns of the population at large. Parents are not asking each other worried questions at the school gates. The rank-and-file at party conferences have not been raising the issue. The sinister antics of the Green Goblin, the alter ego of the head of a nanotech firm in the Spider-man films, probably sum up current popular exposure to the subject.Yet most of the bodies involved in promoting the public discussion of nanotechnologies seem to have decided already that the public won’t like them very much. The National Consumer Council and campaign groups such as Greenpeace were out in force for the launch of a debate about nanotechnologies held by the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering.

The Government, engineering companies, and scientific bodies seem convinced of the need to head off a controversy. There has been a flurry of public funding for projects and consultations on the social, ethical and ideological implications of nanotechnologies and their risks. The Economic and Social Research Council and the Office of Science and Technology’s ScienceWise grant programme have given money to such projects. But few of these projects are concerned with explaining, let alone celebrating, scientific work in this area.

This official sensitivity stems from the fear that nanotechnologies could be the “next GM”. Certainly campaign groups opposed to genetic modification have been seeking a new focus.These groups and their academic supporters are skilled at exploiting the bruised and defensive mood among scientific bodies, and have responded to this mood by pressing for funding for “public engagement” work.

It has not been difficult to convince the nervous worlds of science and policymaking to sign up. Few have pointed out that nanotechnologies are very different from GM. Even though nanotechnologies are at a very early stage of development, with breakthroughs and implications still unknown, scientists are having to devote time and energy to building public relations and gaining widespread approval.

But the public will be ill-served by the groups that purport to represent them. It will not even be cast in the stage army role that it had in the campaigns against genetic modification. In that “debate”, anti-GM campaigners had to make some effort to generate popular concern through the media before they then presented their views as those of the public and used that as their entry ticket to policymaking. With nanotechnologies, campaign groups have had to make no such effort. They have secured their place as mediators of “public concerns” in the alphabet soup of official and semi-official science policy bodies from the outset (or “upstream”, as the think tank Demos called it in a recent pamphlet).

Such a desire to influence policy would be fair enough — we are all free to argue a case — but for the fact that the activity is presented as promoting “public involvement”, “democratising science” and “reinvigorating democracy”. It is none of these. Indeed, it is difficult to think of a system that is less democratic and more open to abuse than having the voice of the public represented by pressure groups in consultative committees, commissions and inquiries. It produces neither better science nor better democracy.

Groups, such as Greenpeace, are hardly disinterested vehicles for public opinion. They are unrepresentative, and there are no means for voting them out, which is the bottom line of any democratic representation and the only thing that forces “representatives” to expose themselves to critical scrutiny.

As for promoting public involvement, negotiating “upstream” about new technologies in the name of the public means negotiating in the absence of the public. It turns the debates into a safe game, where the pressure group agenda determines the limits of the debate, and people who have already decided which views count interpret the results.

Public opinion should be free to emerge (or not) from a less-structured airing as new developments come about. The contributions that really allow people to start thinking and talking about nanotechnologies come from the experienced scientists who try to explain the field. If we want the public to be interested in scientific research and its applications, then we need to hear more from them.

We should not assume that the public is insurmountably opposed to new science and rush to institutionalise new committees in its name. We should let the scientists explain the science and the public speak for itself.

Tracey Brown is the Director of Sense About Science

www.senseaboutscience.org