Fabrice Jotterand of East Carolina’s Brody School of Medicine, gave a great talk about the state of biologically-focused nanotechnology this past week at AMBI. He happened to show a slide that indicated how much money is spent each year on ethical, legal and social research in nanotechnology by the US federal government.

$42.6 million.

In one year.

The Age of the Code of Codes

Let’s put that in perspective. Altogether – all included – the whole kit and caboodle – of ethical, legal, and social research dollars spent by the NHGRI (national human genome research institute) of NIH from the beginning of the ELSI program until 2003 totaled $125 million. This was famously described by Art Caplan as the “full employment act for bioethics,” because it resulted in the hiring of dozens of new people to work in bioethics in institutions around the country: philosophers, doctors, lawyers, social and natural scientists, public health people, religion faculty … lots and lots of people who otherwise might have had little time or access to work on ethical, legal or social issues surrounding what at the time seemed like the most important new frontier in science and medicine.

There are plenty of critics of ELSI. I’m not one of them. I frankly think that the ELSI group has done an extraordinary job of accommodating new methodologies – who would ever have funded a philosopher to study genetics prior to the genome project? – as well as taking some important risks on studies that could very well have reflected poorly on efforts of the genome project itself: mapping of the genes of indigenous peoples, the impact of gene banking on members of disadvantaged groups, investigation of genes for “criminal tendencies.” ELSI put bioethics to work and if it had not come into existence, bioethics as we know it today would probably not exist. We would still be reading about how “medicine saved the life of ethics.”

Some folks who hate ELSI argue that it has made mercenaries out of philosophers and social scientists, that people followed the money. Others argue that research that might otherwise have been subtle or methodologically slower (more ethnographic studies published in books) was suddenly and woefully altered by the lure of filthy lucre.

But seriously, nobody ever got rich from ELSI money. And, of course, that isn’t the way paradigm shifts work. Young investigators had to beg and plead dissertation directors to let them “bet their careers” on dissertations in genetics and society. Trust me.

The real story is more subtle. People whose interests were compatible with ELSI funding were able to do the sort of work they wanted to do by participating in endeavors that ELSI could reasonably fund – or merely by finding a way to work in places that were able to get ELSI funding from the genome project. University bioethics centers, in many places, became plausible targets for money even beyond the ELSI grants because a viable argument could be made that indirect costs from ELSI grants would sustain the efforts not only of ELSI grantees but of ethics committee chairs, research ethics people, a real faculty to teach medical ethics, etc. And indirect costs – half again the amount of the NIH ethics grant – paid for lights and coffee and air conditioning.

The Age of Bioethics ‘Hub Cities’

But the genome project’s agenda for ELSI has changed. First, there was the odd effort to do most ELSI research “internally” through groups run out of the ELSI program offices themselves. It was creative, but many wrote and argued that this was not a great success, and it angered just about everyone who had already said that the ELSI study sections were becoming inbred. Then, Francis Collins, as early as 2003, began to give interviews in which he would lay out the roadmap for a “new” ELSI:

“We clearly need to continue this in the most vigorous way,” Collins told [one interviewer]. But NHGRI will be more assertive in steering ELSI grantees toward specific subjects, he said. “We’re going to shift our emphasis more in the direction of topics that we know we need people to work on. We’re also considering funding centers for ELSI research, as opposed to individual investigators.” The point is to develop institutions with a critical mass of different disciplines.

Correct me if I am wrong, but my review of the 2004 and 2005 budgets for ELSI suggest the almost total aggregation of ELSI dollars by a set of Centers for Excellence in ELSI Research, sort of “hubs” for ELSI research, which receive huge hunks of money to accomplish lots of different projects. I participated in a working group at which the creation of these centers was discussed, and they have easily exceeded expectations. They are all great, and each is led by a researcher with a long track record of good ELSI research and other service to NHGRI and to science itself.

The Case Western site has projects in family studies, community, enhancement, commercialization, etc. The Stanford site studies “new models of deliberative, interactive processes that integrate ELSI considerations into the design and conduct of genetic research,” and features projects on genetics and autism, a documentary film program, benchside ethics etc. The Duke program focuses on intellectual property, and ethics in society. The University of Washington site aims at: assessing the clinical utility of genomics, looking at the uptake for and impact on underserved communities, training, etc.

Get the picture? NIH has basically created four huge think tanks in genomics.

In other words, Collins has I think it is fair to say grown somewhat tired of ELSI as a free-for-all with hundreds of investigators competing willy-nilly for grants of all kinds. And there are reasons why that is problematic. It means that even though there is some significant research funding available for ethics and genetics, it is perhaps a third of the amount available for nanotechnology and society, and the amount of the NHGRI ELSI money that is left to build the investigators spread across the field of bioethics is miniscule once you pay for the CEER centers. And like other core grants of their kind, the CEER centers are expected to help their junior investigators write their own grants – the “R01 pump” model in which the big centers are responsible for – and at huge advantage for – helping the junior scholars in their program to suck up still more ELSI money in order to do still more research to make each CEER center still better at the objectives laid out in the roadmap. So if you are competing for the remaining ELSI money after the CEER checks are paid, you are probably going to be competing with someone amazing from a CEER center, and with zillions of other folks.

Funding in ELSI Genomics Can No Longer Save the Life of Bioethics

It is fair to say that for up and coming researchers in bioethics, ELSI money from NHGRI is no longer a viable support structure for a career, unless there is reason to believe that one can work in a CEER center. Having recently served as the U.S. reviewer for the equivalent of the CEER centers in the UK, funded by the ESRC there, centers that receive double or triple the amount of support, I can tell you that those who are training in ethics and genetics in the U.S. better start looking for jobs at Cardiff, Exeter, Lancaster or Edinburgh than trying to persuade an American university that there is ELSI money sufficient to support a funded trajectory through tenure track.

Now Comes the Age of Small

Every year, $42.6 million in funding for ELSI in nanotechnology [although I am now told that much of this is for “education”]. That’s roughly the amount spent by the US genome project on ELSI in a decade.

What sort of funding is available, and what would pursuing it entail? What kind of person would build a career around nanotechnology and bioethics? Would it look anything like the bioethics scholarship that has grown up around genetics? Let’s “follow the money:” just about everyone knows about the big programs in nanotechnology at the National Science Foundation, each of which requires some ELSI work by those who are funded with the big science grants. But there are other sources of funding: EPA: ORD: NCER offer funding, for example.

And there are journals coming, books, and of course new groups. Just last week this group was announced, comprised of those who have worked in some way or other on ethical legal and social issues in this, um, field. Ray Kurzweil. James Hughes. Vivian Weil. And there are places that work hard on this stuff, like Davis Baird’s group at South Carolina funded with $2.8 million to study all sorts of stuff.

I have big big nanotechnology in my backyard – and the world’s only college devoted to the stuff – and I have spent enough time there to get it that this is an interesting area of work with implications for public health and for enhancement.

But, oddly, the purveyors of scholarship about ethical issues in nanotechnology have been ultraskeptical about the idea of “nanoethics,” and have in fact done a fair share of “ELSI bashing,” even before Congress. Langdon Winner of the STS program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Insitute, e.g., testified to the House Committee on Science that:

Studies of this kind could be launched in a number of ways, including
funding truly cross-disciplinary programs in universities to scope out key
issues and policy alternatives. But I would not advise you to pass a
Nanoethicist Full Employment Act [emphasis mine], sponsoring the creation of a new
profession. Although the new academic research in this area would be of
some value, there is also a tendency for those who conduct research about
the ethical dimensions of emerging technology to gravitate toward the more
comfortable, even trivial questions involved, avoiding issues that might
become a focus of conflict. The professional field of bioethics, for
example, (which might become, alas, a model for nanoethics) has a great
deal to say about many fascinating things, but people in this profession
rarely say “no.”

Ouch. And Baird, we noted, himself says that nanotechnology folks should avoid calling on ethicists “to patch things up as best as they can after the fact,” preferring instead “humanists” and social scientists. Commentator and original guru of the Department of Defense’s Energy’s ELSI program Michael Yesley – don’t ask why there was a DOD ELSI program in genetics; ask Michael if you are curious – disagrees, saying that bioethics is still in the mix for these guys. But he’s wrong. The new nano ELSI people seem to be steering as clear of “bioethics” as they can.

Baird is smart, funny and nobody’s tool but it is notable that to get at the nanotechnology issues he is aided considerably by the USC Nanocenter on his campus. Just like ELSI for genomics, the pride of place comes from proximity and funding; the “nSTS” group is nested right within the nanotechnology group itself. Nobody’s arguing this is a bad thing, but it is hard to see how it counts as a move beyond cultivation of institutions in which “bioethicists can’t say no,” at least not on its surface. How long do you thing nSTS would be funded if they began to argue that USC nanotechnology is horrific? I just do not know. But neither does Baird.

Or maybe that isn’t right. It is hard to tell. The program at USC is the paradigm case. It has tons and tons of projects – educational, scholarly, artistic. It answers to NSF, who have discussed their efforts in detail here.

Is There a There There?

I’m still quite clueless about what it is exactly that nanotechnology means, or to be clearer the sufficient conditions are for a thing to be correctly classed as the product of nanotechnology in as much as that moniker is opposed to something else. I have begun to read voraciously in the nanoethics literature, yet I do not understand the necessary or sufficient conditions for an activity to be nanotechnology.

I am not sure what it means for a scholar to have the special set of skills and knowledge to study social, ethical and legal issues in nanotechnology; are there “special” issues in nanotechnology that require the analog to the medical knowledge that a clinical ethics consultant must have in order to understand what it is that doctors are fighing about at the bedside?

But it is clear from reading just the 10% or so of the dozens of blogs and hundreds of articles that cross my desk in this area that there are interesting social issues here, and that they deserve serious consideration, whether they are special or not. They are there and even if the money devoted to “nanoethics” becomes much like that devoted to ELSI in its formative years at NHGRI, it is easy to see that careers built around the early study of the very small could yield very big scholarship, and new ways of communicating with the public. Even if at the end of the day the work these people do isn’t primarily about nanotechnology.

And it seems clear too that the crowd who do nanoscience are just at the beginning of the curve when it comes to understanding the risks associated with making utopian projections for the future of bionanotechnology – projections whose analog in gene therapy resulted in huge misconceptions among research subjects. Just look to South Korea to see what happens when people believe that technology is earth shaking long before it can even shake the building.