THE NEW YORK TIMES REPORTS ON CALLS FOR A NANOTECHNOLOGY RESEARCH MORATORIUM:

The rhetoric is hardly dispassionate. “Today,” it warns, “mighty Goliath (industrial corporations) has learned his lesson and is exploiting the power of small to become mightier still, while little David (society) cannot even see his opponent.”

That might all seem like ignorable fringe-group ranting if ETC and its executive director, Pat Roy Mooney, did not already have a reputation for successfully stirring things up. During the 1990’s, they faced down Monsanto and other chemical giants in a public debate over the ethics of creating genetically modified plants whose seeds were sterile.

And like the manifesto, Mr. Mooney is more often cautiously earnest than shrill. “We are not assuming this is an evil, awful technology,” Mr. Mooney said last week. “I suspect quite a bit can be done that’s useful.” The danger, he said, is that governments and public interest groups do not have enough control over assessing risks and setting priorities.

Well, these guys are rather too green (or at least, too Green) for my taste, but they’re not idiots. It’s worth reading their report (which is linked from the NYT story) together with this paper from the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology on nanotechnology and the Precautionary Principle.

I’ve also addressed some of these issues in this paper for the Pacific Research Institute, on regulatory issues in nanotechnology.

UPDATE: Here’s a good story from SmallTimes on the ETC group’s report, and reactions thereto, which are somewhat more negative than the Times story above indicates.