The research published in the November issue of Nature Nanotechnology indicated that nano-scientists worry more about the health and environmental impact of nanotechnology than the general public.
The research has garnered extensive media attention since the article in Nature released. There are also many bloggers talking about the implication of the findings. I am, therefore, not going to spend time doing redundant things.
What will be focused here is the background and stories of the scientists survey leading to this Nature article.
About an year from now when I was back in Taiwan for vacation, I received email from my professor about an seemingly easy assignment--looking for contact information for leading nano researchers in the US.
By contact information, I mean which institution they are affiliated with, their physical address, email address, office number, and everything you can think of about a person. Well, since Google has been so powerful a tool where you can almost find anything, I am not too "worried" about the task, especially when I was only responsible for 700 researchers (out of around 1,000 in the whole sample).
Things turned out to be messier and time-consuming than I expected. First of all, as we are looking for "first author" only, many of them are graduate students and had been graduated by the time their research got published and collected in our database. Second, not all of the researchers were affiliated with a University, which usually maintains a more comprehensive information about its constituent. For those who worked in companies or research centers, such as IBM or Dupont, information was really difficult to gather. The third thing that exacerbated the searching process is the citation format used by the academia. As is widely known, many nano authors are from out of the country and it is extremely difficult to ensure the identity of people with the same last name and the same first name initial. For example, you may find a lot of "Wang, T" in different universities or organizations.
As I rummaging through the webpages trying to collect as much information as I can, I started to appreciate those laboratories with detailed Web site explaining what they are doing and, most important of all, their staff and researchers. The coolest thing is that some of them even listed their past group members and their later whereabouts. This information just saved my life!
I am glad that all these are done and the results published in internationally acclaimed journal. This post is perhaps less academic, but it certainly shows the cumbersome process of collecting valuable data.
More detail about the study can be found with the reference listed below.
Scheufele, D. A., Corley, E. A., Dunwoody, S., Shih, T., Hillback, E., & Guston, D. (2007). Nanotechnology: Scientists worry about some risks more than the general public. Nature Nanotechnology.
For more discussion about this study, please visit: Nanopublic authored by Dietram A. Scheufele.
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