Scientific American publishes a six-page news
story on nanotechnology in their April 1996 issue. The story
is inaccurate and biased. From this six-page story, only two
paragraphs are published on the Web by SciAm at this
point.
On the Web, Foresight publishes Ralph Merkle's complete rebuttal of the full text
of the SciAm story. (March 19)
Carl Feynman, son of late Nobel physicist Richard Feynman,
sends letter to SciAm
objecting to their misuse of his father's name and
misrepresentation of his opinion of nanotechnology. (March
22)
Others, including some interviewed for the story, send letters to SciAm objecting to
it.
Chemical & Engineering News, a publication
of the American Chemical Society, publishes a news story on the debate. (April)
Round
2
SciAm sends demand that
Foresight not publish any quotations of their news story on
the Web. SciAm says "proper way" to comment is a
letter to the editor. (April 5)
Foresight replies,
pointing out that the Web publication is clearly fair use and
is a valuable contribution to the debate by bringing it onto
the Web where all parties may participate. (April 13)
Round
3
SciAm's editor-in-chief John Rennie responds to Foresight's
rebuttal, still with no technical content supporting his
negative position on nanotechnology, but claiming he could
get some if he tried. (May 10)
Foresight publishes Rennie's letter
with rebuttal, pointing out his errors in reasoning and
logic, and poor standards of science journalism. We had fun
writing this. (May 18)
For
another reaction to Gary Stix's article in Scientific
American, see Will Ware's
essay.
Round
4
Ralph
Merkle responds to Rennie
with an analysis of the May 10 letter, including "the
curious omission of David Jones." (May 14)
Foresight
chairman Eric Drexler responds
to Rennie, pointing out complete lack of scientific content
in SciAm's position on nanotechnology. (May 14) SciAm publishes a new
article on the web which amounts to a correction of the
previous story, giving links to work in nanotechnology being
done at institutions such as Caltech, IBM, and the Naval
Research Lab. All links but one are supportive of
nanotechnology; the only negative link is to their own
original story, now belatedly available on the SciAm server.
(late May)
Epilogue
The August Scientific American printed four
letters received (available
on their Web site) about their nanotechnology story,
including Carl
Feynman's letter listed in Round 1 above.
Foresight commends Scientific American for
acknowleding the negative reactions to their article (the
section was entitled "Mega-discord over nanotech",
and three of the four letters were critical of their
article).
However, some of the points expressed by one letter writer
and by the editors in their reply seem to us to be based upon
strange logic and thus require a
response from Foresight, including our thoughts on why Scientific
American chose to publish a biased story with such
limited technical content.
A recent addition to the discussion is "TOO
HARD?", an editorial by Stanley Schmidt published in
the January 1997 issue of Analog Science Fiction and
Fact.
April 1997, an article
on the Scientific American Web site hails computational
nanotechnology work done at NASA Ames Research Center as
showing that "...molecule-sized machine parts ... are
certainly plausible and could have enormous potential."
After describing the supercomputer molecular dynamics
simulations of gears made from fullerene nanotubes, done by
Al Globus and colleagues, the article concludes that
"...more and more, research is demonstrating that such
things are possible--possibly sooner than most of us
think." June 1997, a post on sci.nanotech: "SciAm Now Advertising
Nanotech"
We at Foresight are heartened by this evidence that the web is
already coming to be an effective force for higher-quality
journalism and information on topics of public interest.
Eventually, these higher standards can be expected to influence
paper publishing as well.
We salute Scientific American for recognizing the
growing importance of nanotechnology.