When the monk Martin Luther nailed a list of 95 bullet points about the scandal of religious 'indulgences' on the church door in the small German town of Wittenberg in 1517, he was adopting a standard way of airing your views on a subject for debate. "... he requests that those who are unable to be present and debate orally with us, may do so by letter ..." This was Luther's sixteenth century blog. But 50 years earlier Gutenberg's invention of the printing press meant that the debate was all over Germany within the month and all over Europe within three months. So began the Protestant Reformation, one of the foundational developments of western civilisation. It became more than just a local German theological debate because the communications technology existed to prevent its nascent ideas being stifled at birth. Half a millennium later the Worldwide Web took that process and made it into a global, instant and near universal embodiment.

People sometimes say to us that technology is neutral and that its what you use it for that raises ethical issues. We disagree. We find that it is in the very nature of technology to be laden with the values, concerns and aspirations of the society which produced it. , whether it's a desire to print books or have your own website. As a technology becomes embedded in the culture, technology in turn reshapes those values, and the cycle continues. Just as everyone expects to read books, having your own website is now the norm for all organisations and many individuals too. It is also a vehicle for changing ideas. Just as moveable type became the vehicle for a world view which changed European civilisation, what world view is the web now spreading? Its free-form do-it-yourself bottom-up approach has a certain correspondence what some call post-modernity in its style of communication, but it has become the vehicle for every idea under the sun. Which values do we want new technologies like nano to be expressing?

SRT runs its website as an expression of the validity of Christian values in the market place of ideas on science and technology. We try to focus on content and keep the style fairly simple. Our underlying message has not changed much from Luther's - that God offers all people grace and acceptance not primarily by being religious but by coming to faith in Jesus Christ, and we think that this is relevant to all areas of life from printing presses to nanotechnology. Our aim has been these 10 years to contribute to debate on a wide range of contemporary issues with accurate science, keen ethical and social insight, and balanced views, and also to invite the reader to think things through for himself or herself, and to debate with us, as Luther invited. We trust that we have done and may continue to provide a stimulating service. The feedback we have received has been very positive from all over the world. Thank you our known and unknown readership for looking at our papers nailed to the church door in a very different world and times ...