Much of the work in the ethical implications of science and technology is rooted in a concern over the potential and already occurring societal effects of research and the products of research. But science and technology can have profoundly different underlying assumptions about their societal interactions. Technology, or perhaps more specifically engineering, has developed a robust space for ethical discussion - a fact which underlies the recent re-orientation of engineering curriculum in the US (ABET 2000) to provide curricular support for ethics in engineering education. The ethical landscape of technology is rooted in the fact engineers unquestioning acknowledge that they produce goods for society and that those goods often have societally-transforming effects (both for good and for bad). Science has no such assumption (though individuals' beliefs may obviously differ). Many scientists believe that science can be important without any societal implications - science can be simply about knowing the unknown, without that knowledge having any societal effect. Some scientists, in their pursuit of disinterestedness, have explicitly denied the societal interactions of their work. Science, ideally in their minds, stands outside society. This strongly limits the space for ethical discussion. This position is one which has its own long history, but can be detected in Rowland's "Plea for Pure Science" to Vannevar Bush's (ironically, an engineer!) Endless Frontier to the efforts of Cold War nuclear physicists to distinguish bomb design from basic research to the Science Wars debate of the 1990s. Rather than simply cursing this position, I will address the question here of how this effects today's work at the border of science and technology, by presenting a case study on the way that researchers in nanotechnology, a field with explicit societally-transformative goals, is struggling with the pure-applied/science-technology distinction once again.