From Bio to Nano: Learning From The Past to Shape the Future of Technology Assessment

In many Western countries over the last 35 years, the quest for more scientific governance on crucial technological issues led to a broadening of the political world’s sphere of competences. Indeed, various countries decided that dealing with global, invisible, irreversible and irreparable risks had to be handled by an appropriate tool of management of technological innovations. So the usefulness to institutionalize parliamentary Technology Assessment (PTA) offices emerged. Nowadays, PTA is an instrument particularly suitable to study the new shape of science and society’s interface and it represents a remarkable attempt to reform the institutional settings of innovation. However, while the overall uncertainty surrounding science and technology has been used by public actors like parliamentarians or ministers in the past to legitimize a first generation of PTAs, the emergence of a second generation in the 1990’s – centred on the constructive, interactive or participatory TA approches – emphazises the co-evolution of technology and society rather than the former linear determinist rationale. In this context, the STS community of scholars is increasingly called upon by the public authorities to provide a “professional service role” (RIP, 1994), that is to say to take a step into action out of the border of their intellectual engagement. Then, we suggest to compare two successive periods by looking at the institutional management of two distinct-but-complementary technological issues: biotechnology and nanotechnology. The former has been taken into account by public actors at a time when the second generation of PTAs was not yet rooted in the political practices. Thus, the management of the public debate related to biotechnology has been characterized by a lack of sensitive, fruitful and interactive communication between the stakeholders involved in the TA process, while the first applications were already being commercialized. On the other hand, the latter is currently being tackled at a moment when the social shaping of technology is widely acknowledged as well as the STS community may be invited to pass from observation to participation in the political sphere. Given the uncertainty and complexity encircling nanotechnology as well as its huge potential in many interconnected disciplinary fields, the need to avoid the pitfall of the biotechnology’s experience is commonly accepted. We offer to take nanotechnology as one of the most challenging technological issue to look beyond the biotechnology’s roadblock and to show in which proportion the same scenario is reasonably thinkable today, in order to spotlight whether we have learnt from the past in considering what is 1 sometimes called “a new industrial revolution”. We will raise some research questions like: how different are current TA practices as compared to former ones? Are there new regimes emerging? Given the current technological convergence, how complicated would it be to deal with NBIC technologies if we missed the point with biotechnology alone? How suitable is PTA to engage in such interdisciplinary issues? Are we assisting the emergence of a third PTA generation around the growing role of the STS community? How does this scientific community dialogue with the historians of science who analyzed the earlier industrial revolutions