Problem is that by now science and technology seems to change so fast that its nearly impossible to have a group like disabled people to be involved in a meaningful way on a constant basis. Reality is that disabled people still fight for access to buildings, food, income…. and the NGO’s of disabled people are so underfunded for the problems disabled people face thats its hard for them to build capacity in the fast changing S&T arena. Furthermore disabled people are underrepresented on the academic level which therefore leads to a lack of visibility within the academic discourse…

Anyone have any insight on this?

thanks for your comment!

Indeed I could have mentioned the term disability in the NBIC report. Very likely most of the disability hits in the NBIC report are generated by the three article I wrote/coauthored in the NBIC report. I could have mentioned many S&T endeavours underway to fix disabled people. I indeed mention many in my columns and articles I wrote over time (for many various aspects of my writing on S&T I refer to my webpage and my 77 columns) . However many of the problems disabled people face are not solved by high tech bodily assistive devices and bodily assistive devices will not be available for all disabled people who have a problem that could be solved by them (I all the time have a global outlook). There is more to the problems of disabled people and to solving their problems than bodily interventions. And even if I would have had the space to write about all the bodily assistive devices interventions the reality still holds that there is a lack of visibility of disabled people in many problem discourses and that includes many aspects of the nano discourses (for example disabled people were not part of the nano risk consultations of the International Risk governance council).

I mentioned the NBIC and the CTEK reports as two examples of what goals drive S&T. Do you really think that the converging technology field would have generated the buzz if it would have been exclusively sold as a way to solve the bodily problems of disabled people? No. And disabled people were not the main focus of the NBIC report and are not the main focus of the general promotion of new S&T fields (not some subfields within a new field). But we so far have not looked hard at what goals make S&T advances succeed. S&T advances do not just happen. They have to be sold. Question is which goal fulfillments are promised by new fields. So what problems were promised to be solved by NBIC when it was sold. What is promised by synthetic biology, by geoengineering, by artificial intelligence….. What abilities are seen to be preserved or strengthened by different S&T put forward? This column was about suggesting new lenses for analysis and about highlighting missed voices. It was not about any given S&T but about broader dynamics in play.

I do think this ‘ableism’ discussion is very interesting and important though it does my head in as a practical person thinking what the heck to do about it!

At the moment no idea, but will ponder with Matter, though thanks again Gregor for raising this issue.

My reading of Gregor’s piece was that innovation is often justified in terms of what it will do for “disabled” people, but often the process of deciding what the “norm” is, what should be done to bring people up to the “norm” and who makes these decisions anyway, are less than clear.

But I should let him respond to you directly…

It also mentions various forms of “disabled” or “disability” 134 times. Too bad Dr. Wolbring didn’t bring that up, or tell us anything about what has gone on in the 7 intervening years. There are two successor volumes in the NBIC series he could have searched just for starters. Not that I think counting words is going to tell us much.

To pick just one area where work is ongoing that could inform this discussion, how about nanotech and prosthetics. Dean Kamen’s keynote speech at this year’s Nanobusiness Conference prominently featured DEKA’s work on advanced prosthetics and the (very positive) reaction that both disabled people and their families had after working with prototypes. It was a most inspiring presentation, which had the audience abuzz.

The Martin Bionics division of OrthoCare Innovations is also works on improving prosthetics, with support from the Oklahoma Nanotechnology Initiative. Specifically, they are developing superhydrophobic nanocoatings to make prosthetics more comfortable and less prone to infection, see http://www.oknano.com/oklahoma_companies.html