Democratizing nanotech, then and now.

In October 2006, in the first issue of this journal, I described the idea of ‘democratizing science’ — a state of affairs in which non-experts have active and constructive roles in science policy decisions1. At that time, there were expectations that nanotechnology would be a laboratory for experimenting with the idea of democratizing science. From this came an impressive battery of focus groups, citizen juries, consensus conferences, largescale surveys and other instruments, both in the US and the UK. If democratizing science is going to happen, and especially if it is going to become standard practice in the formulation of science policy, then it needs to navigate a course between two undesirable options. First, we do not want science policy determined by political values that disregard scientific knowledge. In the dreadful case of Lysenkoism, for example, Soviet agricultural policy was based on crazy biological theories modelled on Stalinist ideology, with disastrous results for food production. Second, we want to avoid forcing science policy on a population that resents it, even if the policy is grounded in good scientific knowledge. Some places in the US and elsewhere have laws that require childhood vaccines for the human papilloma virus (HPV) on the grounds that this reduces the likelihood of getting cervical cancer or genital warts. However, in many cases parents can exempt their daughters from the vaccine if it conflicts with the family’s religious values. This way, a democratic society makes science policy through democratic processes, but its conscience-based exemptions enable families to disagree with that policy. This is an eye of a needle that is difficult to thread: avoid decisions based on pseudoscience, but also avoid decisions that come from undemocratic processes2. Where are we now, five years later?