In 1986, I was a member of the faculty at Trinity University in Texas directing their intercollegiate debate program. One day, Timothy Wilkins, a student debater, returned from the library with a new book, Engines of Creation . He showed it to me, and left with it for his dorm room. The next day, he stormed into my office and demanded I read it at once. I did and during the next eight months, we introduced the subjects discussed in Engines into competitive debate, and ever since then nanotechnology has become an area of contention in hundreds, if not thousands, of debate rounds across the nation.
Competitive debate is a laboratory for instruction in public speaking and argumentation.
On every competitive level, this lab features a series of speeches which center on an agreed-upon resolution or topic. When Chris Peterson asked me to write this short piece, she said she gets many calls from debaters and wants to know how debate has used information on nanotechnology. The answer to her question is Engines seemed to have been written for debaters. Assuredly that was not the case, yet the interface between the way megaissues were discussed in Engines and how the same issues are debated was and still is remarkable. There are three reasons why Engines has been so popular in debate.