Katherine Stapp

NEW YORK, Dec 30 2001 (IPS) — Scientific breakthroughs this year herald potential benefits for developing countries but experts urge that research be managed in a socially responsible manner.

In computing, the big news during 2001 involved advances in nanotechnology, a field that some day might produce super-fast computer chips so small that it would take about one million of them to encircle a grain of rice.

“This developing technology presents an unprecedented new set of technical and economic opportunities,” says the Foresight Institute, a U.S. non-profit that describes its work as helping to prepare society for anticipated advanced technologies, particularly nanotechnology. “Along with these new capabilities come new risks, and new responsibilities.”

The applications of such tiny machines, selected by Science magazine for its top Breakthrough of the Year, are wide-ranging. For example, it is envisioned that, one day, microscopic “nanobots” could be injected into the bloodstream to repair damaged cells or monitor the levels of drugs like insulin.

“MNT (molecular nanotechnology) should be developed in ways that make it possible to distribute the benefits of the technology to the four-fifths of humanity currently desperate to achieve material wealth at any environmental or security cost,” the Institute says in a preamble to guidelines on research and development in the field.

“Providing technical abundance alone cannot make a people wealthy and secure. This also requires education, and social arrangements described as a high-trust, civil society,” the Institute notes. “However, technological abundance can alleviate many of the conflicts that stem primarily from rivalry over resources. Reducing this specific cause of conflict via molecular manufacturing could make the world more secure than it is today.”

MNT is hardly a new field but it did make dramatic progress in 2001. Defying sceptics, researchers in the United States, the Netherlands, and elsewhere wired up the first nano-circuit, a component of a powerful computer chip that could presage revolutionary advances in everything from cancer research to quantum mechanics.

A nanometre is one-billionth of a metre. To put this into perspective, today’s state-of-the-art computer chips can pack some 40 million transistors onto a slab of silicon no bigger than a postage stamp. While this is nano-size, it is still tens of thousands of times bigger than a molecular scale chip, which has the potential to hold billions of transistors.

“Computer chip technology and scientific breakthroughs have been marching in step for decades,” say the editors of Science magazine in their annual Breakthrough of the Year edition. “Without computers, scientists couldn’t track climate change, sequence the genomes of entire organisms, or image the human brain at work.”

But the true breakthrough, says editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy, was not the manipulation of molecules into transistors but their transformation into working circuitry – a feat achieved by scientists in a number of countries.

Kennedy cautions that “getting from here to there is apt to be a long and bumpy road, because production scales and economic costs are likely to be formidable. Indeed, we have no idea what a fabrication facility in a post-silicon world might look like.

“But in the tiny yet functional molecular circuits scientists have generated during this year, there is something like proof of principle, and that is indeed a breakthrough.”

Nevertheless, development and technology “enjoy an uneasy relationship,” says U.N. Development Programme head Mark Malloch Brown.

“Within development circles there is a suspicion of technology boosters as too often people promoting expensive, inappropriate fixes that take no account of development realities,” Malloch Brown writes in the agency’s 2001 Human Development Report.

For this reason, ensuring that scientists from around the world – not just in the West – actively participate in cutting-edge research projects is key, says the American Council for the United Nations University (UNU), a non-profit group that links scientists in the UnitedStates and the global network of scholars within the UNU.

One way to achieve this is through the encouragement of “global collaboratories,” far-flung research centres that would communicate with each other via Internet2 to promote beneficial, transcultural research, the Council says.

Internet2 is a consortium led by more than 180 U.S. universities to promote advanced cyberspace networking with partners around the world.

Some regions already are jumping on the nano-bandwagon. The Asia- Pacific Nanotechnology Forum brings together governments, industry, and venture capitalists to steer growth in the field and try to ensure that Asia – a leading maker of computers and semiconductors – is not left out in the cold when manufacturing shrinks to the molecular level.

Beyond the field of computing, advances based on the mapping of the human genome also were cited among the most significant scientific achievements of 2001. However, the editors of Science lamented the lack of progress in essential vaccines for diseases like HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis – which kill millions of people around the world, particularly in developing countries.

Still, the genomes of more than 60 other organisms were sequenced, including the rat, mouse, a malaria mosquito and various pathogens, spurring optimism for progress in the future.

Not every discovery in 2001 boded well for life on earth, however. The warming of the planet due to human activity is now supported by abundant scientific evidence, and the news is expected to get worse, from an average temperature increase of 0.6 degrees centigrade during the last century to an alarming 5.8 degrees by 2099.

Such a warming would be catastrophic for low-lying ecosystems – much of the earth, in other words – but the industrial and socioeconomic variables as they relate to the greenhouse effect are still too complex to precisely forecast.