Yesterday, our first guest instructor, Mary Beth Williams, talked about nanotechnology.  She’s a chilli hot chemistry prof, and excellent for the students: like me, most of them have yet to recover from their chemistry ‘education’. Two comments came up on the comment wall which Mary Beth did not get time to answer.  She does now:

1. Would people try to become God by spontaneously creating things with nano tech?
This is an enormously complex question because I think at the heart of it you are asking about scientific ethics. However no scientist can spontaneously create life. But do scientists, in general, create things that have the potential to impact living things around them? Yes. They make drugs that save lives, modify plants so that they grow in droughts, and discover how DNA encodes age with telomeres. Scientists, like everyone, have to make decisions about the ethical and moral implications of their work; in the context of scientific research, it is the potential outcomes and use of research – good and bad – that is the subject of these decisions and dilemmas.  Moral and ethical decision making in science could be the subject of another course altogether….

2.  If we drink the gold stuff [your nano solution] will we start laying golden eggs?  or would we just have sparkly poop?
Well, we all know that what goes in must come out….one way or the other, although I doubt anyone in the room actually lays eggs of any sort.  But if you were to drink the nanogold solution, remember that it’s red, not sparkly, and it would be a very, very small amount so it would not be worth it to pan for gold.

Also a hit with the class was the notion of nano-condoms.  It’s amazing where nano particles are going.  One of the students asked Mary Beth whether she would recommend them over Trojan.  Nothing is sacred in my class.