Front and Back Covers. Volume 19 Number 6. December 2003

Back cover caption NANO‐PURITY AND CLEANLINESS This advertisement by a Swedish company specializing in technologically advanced workwear, including cleanroom clothing, illustrates Mikael Johansson's article on the anthropology of nanotechnology in this issue (pp. 3‐6). Juxtaposing modern scientific ideas about purity and cleanliness with the religious, the advertisement suggests that although nuns and nano‐scientists wear similar clothing, their concerns are very different: while nuns may aspire to moral purity in their renunciatory vocation, to modern science they and their clothing are as polluting to the laboratory environment as all other animate beings. Mother Sabrina exchanges her nun's habit for scientifically engineered clothing and thus reduces particle emissions into the environment. Clothing as a symbol of moral purity is contrasted with that produced for the practical purpose of reducing environmental pollution in the workplace. The heart of nanotechnology research is the cleanroom where experimentation takes place. In the minute context of the nanometer scale, a single microscopic dust particle is gigantic, posing enormous risks to experiments. By far the most contaminating presence in a cleanroom are humans, who drop about 10,000 skin particles per minute, each 3,000‐5,000 nanometres across. Humans must cover their bodies in protective clothing, not to protect themselves from experiments, but to protect experiments from their own dirt. In such an environment human behaviour needs to be strictly controlled, including regulating food and drink intake and body movement. According to one cleanroom manual, people who tend to be nervous, bad‐tempered or resistant to authority should not work in a cleanroom as they are more likely to contaminate the area. Cleanrooms are specially engineered to withstand vibration generated by outside sources such as cars and inside sources such as machines. Visible light with a bandwidth of 400‐800 nm needs to be strictly controlled with light filters as this can ruin experiments. The heavily regulated nano‐lab is clearly distinct from the cloister, but they are not without similarities and interesting inversions. Both deal with worlds invisible to the naked eye and are in one way or another deeply concerned with purity and regulating human behaviour. If the mysteries of the universe and ontological truths used to be the province of theologians and priests, natural scientists today see their vocation as revealing and acting as custodians of fundamental truth.