Nanotechnology

In the early 2000s, as nanotechnology (engineering at the scale of billionths of a metre, where you're pushing individual molecules around) moved from theory towards actual products, a dramatic "grey goo" panic took hold. The grey goo scenario, originally sketched in Eric Drexler's 1986 book Engines of Creation, imagined swarms of tiny self-replicating robots that copied themselves out of whatever matter they could find until the planet was reduced to sludge. Drexler himself later said he wished he had never used the term. In April 2003, Prince Charles privately lobbied the Royal Society (Britain's national academy of science) to examine nanotech's social and environmental risks. In a July 2004 Independent on Sunday article he went public with his concerns, while at the same time disavowing the "grey goo" framing the tabloids had pinned on him: "I have never used that expression and do not believe that self-replicating robots will multiply uncontrollably and devour the planet." Too late. The media ran with dystopian imagery, and public anxieties surged that scientists were "playing God." The Royal Society's 2004 report Nanoscience and nanotechnologies: opportunities and uncertainties, partly commissioned in response to Charles's lobbying, treated the grey-goo scenario as speculative but called for real oversight of nano-scale materials.

An early example of how a sensational risk can spark disproportionate policy debate around a new technology. The grey-goo phantom never arrived. The real governance challenges — worker exposure in nano-manufacturing, engineered nanoparticles escaping into the environment, the safety of nanomaterials in medicine — turned out to be more mundane and more important, and they landed on regulators' desks in part because the panic had put nanotech on the map to begin with.