Is nanotech morally acceptable ?
What do you think about nanotechnology? Do you think it is safe? What do you think about it’s commercialization? These are all questions that numerous US and Europe citizens were asked in an interesting survey done by the journal Nature Nanotechnology. It ended up with even more interesting results.
The report showed that opinions on the morality of nanotechnology vary from country to country, mainly depending on the state of religiousness in a certain country. In the United States and a few European countries where religion is an important part of life (Italy, for example), nanotechnology and it’s subfield nanomedicine are perceived as less morally acceptable. In other countries (Germany, for example), most people don’t look on the subject through a prism of religion and they find it morally acceptable.
“The level of ‘religiosity’ in a particular country is one of the strongest predictors of whether or not people see nanotechnology as morally acceptable,” said Dietram Scheufele, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The survey results are very important, because they show that the population tends to have a negative look on science, because they’re looking at it through eyes of religion, said Scheufele. “It raises a big question: What’s really going on in our public discourse where science and religion often clash?”
The results in the United States are very surprising, because the US is one of the most advanced countries in the world in the field of nanotechnology. Most of the discoveries actually happen all the time on American universities, but still, religion seems to be the strongest factor in determining whether nanotech is morally acceptable or not.
Source: dx.doi.org/doi:10.1038/NNANO.2008.361
