The drive towards nanotechnology’s commercialisation goes hand-in-hand with concerns about its risks. In the past six years, especially since the founding of the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) in 2001 and the release of the Royal Society’s report on nanotechnologies in 2004, debates about nanotechnologies’ risks have become more of a central focus for governments, scientists and businesses concerned about the successful commercialisation of nanotechnologies, and for members of the public concerned that the market success does not jeopardize the health and safety of consumers or the environment. While these debates continue, investment into nanotech’s commercialization continues to rise. In 2005 alone, total global private and public investment in nanotech research and development reached $9.6 billion.
Despite these high levels of financial investment and commitment, there has been relatively little academic attention given to the financial risks to investors and to how discussions of these risks figure in the construction of the nanomarket, even though the speed and level of investment have been important factors driving concerns about health and environmental risks. This research investigated the relationships between public relations and communication firms promoting the commercialisation of nanotechnology and scientists who are spinning out start-up companies, financial journalists and other mediators, and investors. It focused on mediated, financial and market information about the nanotech field that appeared in financial, science and trade publications, company reports and marketing materials, brokerage firms, and websites dedicated to nano-investing. Research was conducted in the United Kingdom and in the United States.
A key aim of the project was to examine how the financial risks and potentials of nanotechnologies are being communicated to the investing public. We wanted our focus to be on the financial understanding of science: how are decisions to invest in a new technology made, how do people get relevant information, who are the mediators of claims made for exciting new technologies, how are claims assessed? To do this, we mapped the communication circuits over which information about the financial potentials and risks of the nanotech field travels, to understand how financial risk is communicated. Since it is often the case that the financial and scientific media act as privileged translators of science and technology information, especially in regards to new technologies’ market potential, we conducted an ethnography of the sources for financial and science journalists covering the nanotech market – scientists and institutions working in nanotechnologies, their press agents and public relations firms – and finished with the journalists themselves. We also focused on scientists and engineers who are building companies out of their research in nanotechnologies, to understand how they communicate the financial potentials of their company, and the nanomarket as a whole, to prospective investors. Our approach throughout was to look at the interpretive work done by those actors for whom the coherence, viability and validity of claims made for nanotechnologies was a practical and pressing issue, and use their interpretations as the key to understand the field.
Some Highlights of the Research
Definitional uncertainties, struggles and flexibilities: Nanotechnology is difficult to define as a single industry or market because the technologies span several industrial sectors. There are enormous definitional uncertainties and struggles over the commercialisation of nanotech, and there is scepticism about the coherence of the nanotechnologies in financial terms. Journalists, PR, company owners and investors all debate over exactly what product or company can legitimately be defined as ‘nanotech’, and whether or not there exists a unified, single ‘nanomarket’. Since nanotechnologies are diverse and their application spans several industrial sectors, when stakeholders speak of a ‘nanomarket’ this signals an effort on their part to create an investible market out of a disparate set of companies and technologies. For instance, there are several ‘nanoindexes’, or investment indexes much like the Dow, that exist to help investors who are interested in investing in nanotech make investment decisions or to track the progress of the market. The companies listed within these indexes, however, do not share a single sector, normally a common characteristic of most indexes, making nanotech indexes less valuable as an indicator of financial health, but very valuable to those interested in seeing that a nanotech market is created: a nanotech index, in other words, is interpreted as an attempt to create an identifiable market rather than as evidence of the latter’s existence.
Interpreting and controlling risk and uncertainty: Perceptions of risk can be differentiated according to different categories of actor, and the relation between health and financial risks is not always a direct one. One strategy for understanding and controlling uncertainty is to interpret risk in terms of previous events. For example, journalists relate the market to the recent dotcom boom and bust. By contrast, when PR and scientists talk about the risks of nanotechnologies and how these may impact the future of the nanomarket, the ‘lessons’ of GM are invoked as a model of what can happen when communication with the public is ineffective; and for PR, the public perception of health risk is potentially more consequential than actual risk.
Assessing scientific and financial validity: PR plays a key role in this field, and journalists use a range of strategies for dealing with PR copy, which is seen as potentially partial and rhetorically inflated. These strategies include avoiding direct assessment in favour of attribution and relying on the fact that potentially partial sources need to build up their own reputation for reliability. In contrast to social scientific accounts of journalism that treat journalists as simply manipulated by PR, the journalists we spoke to have to be skilled and sceptical interpreters of information. For investors however, the issue of scientific validity is a relatively peripheral concern, given its indirect relation to financial potential.