Current Projects
Nanotech and Public Opinion
Current research shows that public awareness of nanotechnologies is low, and that the relationship between public knowledge of nanotechnologies and understanding of their potential impacts is complicated – in part by the role of the media. Using longitudinal national surveys, we track public understanding of and public attitudes toward nanotechnology.
We also explore the complicated role of the media in reflecting and influencing public opinion about NSE, building on a decade of study of audience reactions to an award-winning science web site, The Why Files, headquartered at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Finally, we examine attiudes and perceptions of risks and benefits among leading nano researchers in the U.S. These data collections are coordinated wit the public opinion surveys in order to allow for direct comparisons between different groups of stakeholders.
Public Participation
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are cooperating with five other universities to organize a multi-sited consensus conference on nanotechnology, focusing on issues of human enhancement. In the tradition of Danish consensus conferences on science and technology, a group of non-expert citizens will come together to learn about human enhancement nanotechnologies, discuss their concerns and hopes for research and technological development, and generate a list of policy recommendations for broader dissemination.
The “National Citizens Technology Forum” will coordinate six of these citizen panels, each working independently over the course of two weekends in March 2008. Between the face-to-face meetings, all participants from all six panels will interact online with experts in nanotechnology science, policy, and ethics. This “K2K” component (keyboard to keyboard) represents an experimental adaptation of the consensus conference model to a virtual means of communicating.
Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will not only explore the utility and impacts of such online deliberation, but will also compare the enactment of this consensus conference with a prior one organized in Madison in 2005.