With nanotechnology being a relatively new field, the questions regarding safety and ethics are steadily increasing with the development of the research. This book aims to give an overview on the ethics associated with employing nanoscience for products with everyday applications. The risks as well as the regulations are discussed, and an outlook for the future of nanoscience on a manufacturer’s scale and for the society is provided. Handbook of Nanoethics is perfect for , academicians and scientist, as well as all other industry professionals and researchers. It is a good introduction for newcomers in the field who do not want to dive deep into the details but are eager to understand the ethical challenges and possible solution related to nanotechnology and ethics.

The tools of nanodiagnostics, nanotherapy, and nanorobotics are expected to revolutionize the future of medicine, leading to presymptomatic diagnosis of disease, highly effective targeted treatment therapy, and minimum side effects. Handbook of Nanophysics: Nanomedicine and Nanorobotics presents an up-to-date overview of the application of nan

Nanotechnology has been the subject of extensive ‘assessment hype,’ unlike any previous field of research and development. A multiplicity of stakeholders have started to analyze the implications of nanotechnology: Technology assessment institutions around the world, non-governmental organizations, think tanks, re-insurance companies, and academics from science and technology studies and applied ethics have turned their attention to this growing field’s implications. In the course of these assessment efforts, a social phenomenon has emerged – a phenomenon the editors define as assessment regime. Despite the variety of organizations, methods, and actors involved in the evaluation and regulation of emerging nanotechnologies, the assessment activities comply with an overarching scientific and political imperative: Innovations are only welcome if they are assessed against the criteria of safety, sustainability, desirability, and acceptability. So far, such deliberations and reflections have played only a subordinate role. This book argues that with the rise of the nanotechnology assessment regime, however, things have changed dramatically: Situated at the crossroads of democratizing science and technology, good governance, and the quest for sustainable innovations, the assessment regime has become constitutive for technological development. The contributions in this book explore and critically analyse nanotechnology’s assessment regime: To what extent is it constitutive for technology in general, for nanotechnology in particular? What social conditions render the regime a phenomenon sui generis? And what are its implications for science and society?

Nanotechnology seems to escape boundaries and definitions. The 'Rush to Nanoscale' spreads throughout different sites and arenas, involving a multiplicity of actors, meanings and spaces in which they emerge. The uncertainty of nanotechnology appears to be both a condition and a consequence of this situation. This volume adds to the collective effort of charting the multiple and heterogeneous dimensions that characterize nanotechnology, by analyzing the numerous modalities through which different stakeholders and actors provide definitions, attribute meaning and sense to nano-enabled innovations. The chapters of the book attempt to highlight how nanotechnologies, their discourse, and their actual and potential implications cannot be isolated in laboratories, factories, markets and separate discussion arenas.

Claims about the transformations enabled by modern science and medicine have been accompanied by an unsettling question in recent years: might the knowledge being produced undermine – rather than further – human and animal well being? On the Dual Uses of Science and Ethics examines the potential for the skills, know-how, information, and techniques associated with modern biology to serve contrasting ends. In recognition of the moral ambiguity of science and technology, each chapter considers steps that might be undertaken to prevent the deliberate spread of disease. Central to achieving this aim is the consideration of what role ethics might serve. To date, the ethical analysis of the themes of this volume has been limited. This book remedies this situation by bringing together contributors from a broad range of backgrounds to address a highly important ethical issue confronting humanity during the 21st century.

The areas of personal genomics and citizen science draw on – and bring together – different cultures of producing and managing knowledge and meaning. They also cross local and global boundaries, are subjects and objects of transformation and mobility of research practices, evaluation and multi-stakeholder groups. Thirdly, they draw on logics of ‘convergence’: new links between, and new kinds of, stakeholders, spaces, knowledge, practices, challenges and opportunities. This themed collection of essays from nationally and internationally leading scholars and commentators advances and widens current debates in Science and Technology Studies and in Science Policy concerning ‘converging technologies’ by complementing the customary focus on technical aspirations for convergence with the analysis of the practices and logics of scientific, social and cultural knowledge production that constitute contemporary technoscience. In case studies from across the globe, contributors discuss the ways in which science and social order are linked in areas such as direct-to consumer genetic testing and do-it-yourself biotechnologies. Organised into thematic sections, ‘Knowing New Biotechnologies’ explores: • ways of understanding the dynamics and logics of convergences in emergent biotechnologies • governance and regulatory issues around technoscientific convergences • democratic aspects of converging technologies – lay involvement in scientific research and the co-production of biotechnology and social and cultural knowledge.