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investment in nanotechnology research and development soared quickly to almost US$1 billion annually. The NNI emerged at a salient point in US history as lawmakers worked to reshape national science policies in response to growing international economic competition and the increasing commercialization of academic science. This paper examines how advocates of nanotechnology successfully marketed their initiative. It pays especial attention to their optimistic depiction of societies and economies improved by nanotechnology, and considers why utopian techno-visions continue to flourish despite their tendency to ultimately disappoint. Keywords: Nanotechnology; Science Policy; Technological UtopiasIt was as if nanotechnology had gone through a phase transition; what had once been perceived as blue sky research … was now being seen as the key technology of the 21st century. 1 On 24 October 2003, California politicians, academics, and civic leaders attended the groundbreaking ceremony for the California NanoSystems Institute in Santa Barbara. This US$55 million high-tech building, with its ultra-filtered clean rooms and modular laboratories, represented only a fraction of the burgeoning national investment in nanotechnology. 2 Since 2000, when President William J. Clinton announced a new national initiative to foster the tools of the 'next industrial revolution,' dozens of universities and corporations have initiated programs where scientists and engineers research phenomena and technologies at the nanoscale. 3 Following proclamations by Clinton and other leaders, government and commercial investment into nanotechnology soared. In 2004, federal agencies in the USA dispensed W. Patrick McCray is an assistant professor in the History Department at the University of California at Santa Barbara, USA. Email: pmccray@history.ucsb.edu. He is the author, most recently, of Giant Telescopes: Astronomical Ambition and the Promise of Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). He is currently engaged in a pilot research project that examines the recent history of nanotechnology with especial emphasis on science policy, community formation, public perceptions, and the collection of oral histories. W. P. McCrayalmost a billion dollars a year to eager researchers ( Figure 1 shows the federal funding profile for nanotechnology research). 4 Meanwhile, forecasts, not from intemperate prognosticators but sober-minded science managers, predicted that the international market for nano-goods would be US$1 trillion by 2015. The production of these goods, supporters said, would require a new high-tech (and highly paid) workforce of some two million people, potentially leading to major restructuring of the global workforce. 5 To its advocates, nanotechnology is a 'transcendent realm,' a regime where research in the physical and biotechnological sciences may converge with information technologies and the cognitive sciences. 6 While definitions of what nanotechnology is varyindeed, one of its rhetorical strengths would see...

If they are successfully to carry out a research programme, astronomers need two crucial resources - access to telescopes, and sufficient time allocated on them to make observations and collect data. This paper employs the concept of the `moral economy' - the unwritten expectations and traditions that regulate and structure a community - as an analytical model to examine how astronomers and science managers allocate resources. I use the example of the Gemini 8-Meter Telescopes Project, a recently completed pair of large telescopes in Hawaii and Chile, as a vehicle to explore the moral economy of contemporary astronomy. Paying particular attention to the early years of the project (1987-92), I describe plans to build a new telescope facility for the entire US astronomy community, against the backdrop of the institutional, political and financial forces that shape national and international astronomy. By focusing on the process through which astronomers moved the Gemini telescope project from abstract blueprints and budgets into glass and steel, I examine themes such as access, equity, control and authority in contemporary science.

Starting in the 1960s, astronomers’ analog view of the universe gradually transformed as scientists and engineers introduced digital computers, electronic detectors, and magnetic recording media into observatory domes and laboratories. The advantages of this were considerable: once the underlying technical architecture and social practices were in place, digital data can be more easily analyzed, manipulated, transported, and communicated. As they replaced and supplemented older technologies, astronomers’ basic research practices changed accordingly. This helped reshape norms and behaviors in the research community, altering astronomy’s moral economy. The importance of collecting, processing, and sharing digital data transcended specific institutions, individual research questions, and national boundaries. This article explores this process, using representative examples and the metaphor of data friction, focusing on both the development of hardware and data standards. For astronomers, the transition from analog to digital was, in both senses of the phrase, a universal concern.