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Nanotechnology: Nanoscale Particles A Health Hazard?
securitas writes "Before you start dreaming of all the benefits nanotechnology will bring you, think about the health hazards. Over two dozen studies that date back to 1984 indicate that nanoscale materials are toxic because their size allows them to be easily ingested, inhaled or absorbed through the skin. Proponents of nanotech dismiss the meta-study as nonsense, while the authors suggest a moratorium on nanotech development until further health research is completed." The paper (726 kB PDF) that prompted this article is available.
This remind me of an episode of the Twilight Zone where someone was injected with clever nanobots and they actually started improving the person by putting eyes in the back of his head etc. They ended up advancing him so far that he was shunned by society and try to kill himself but found out that the nanobots would fix whatever he did
:)
i.e. cut his writes they would heal it straight away
As he become good as immortal it was implied that he lived forever. Now that can't be good. Having to watch daytime TV for the next 1000 years
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
This just means that appropriate care must be taken as when dealing with other tiny organic machines such as bacteria and viruses.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Ack! You beat me to the punch on the Diatom fossils.
Don't forget Asbestos, and fiberglass. Both of these substances are extremely common, but relatively inert and harmless UNLESS dust particles are inhaled. Once in your lungs, the microscopic fibers embed themselves into your lung tissue causing scarring and, with the former lung cancer, the latter, silicon fibrosis; either of which is a terrible way to die.
Now, imagine inhaling a microscopic machine designed to do who-knows-what! If a simple strand of glassfibre can form a deadly dust, imagine swarms of machines (along with their power supplies, etc.) chewing their way into your lungs.
I've gotta come down on the side of the cautious on this one. Until you can control it, don't deploy it.
In Neil Stephenson's great nanotech novel The Diamond Age, the diseases caused by the spread of nano-agents in the atmosphere caused a major public health problem, with a widespread epidemic of life-threatening asthma caused by inhalation of the agents.
Everything possible to be believ'd is an Image of Truth - Wm. Blake
Most anti-perspirants, afaik, work by clogging the pores with zinc. So this is a fairly straightforward premise. If you have something, anything, that is small enough to be taken in directly through the skin, it's a problem.
People pooh-poohing this study reeks of similiarty with the cigarette industry of the 50's.
My
Limekiller
There's some middle ground between "thinking it's totally benign", and "halting all development until exhaustive health studies are conducted". An overblown reaction like that makes the guy sound either like a luddite or someone after a healthy grant.
Bedrock times, 2003AD. Again, plans to develop a promising invention called "the wheel" are suspended pending investigation into health risks. Opponents point out that we cannot take the slightest risk, lest we suffer another disaster like that "fire" invention which destroyed an entire wheat field and badly burnt Zog's hand."
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
It's called the Precautionary Principle, and as a philosophy it requires anyone advocating a new technology to prove that it isn't dangerous. Nevermind about the logical difficulties involved in proving a negative...logic is never the forte of luddites.
Quality Control will be a nightmare...99.99% accuracy will result in 100 errors per million units produced. That is 100 errors straight off the production line.
Imagine what will be happening to the things as they age.
I guess there are two ways of designing a nanobot. You could design it to decay quickly. That means that we will have billions of the these tiny devices going through strange transformations in the decay process. You could design the nano machines to be durable...but things change with time. Nothing is perfectly stable. That means the tiny machines will end up in alls sorts of unpredictible configurations.
Even worse, it is impossible to predict how the nano machines created today will interact with those created tomorrow. When talking of billions of things, it is likely that many will end up in stable configurations where they are doing things we don't like.
A couple milliamperes alone are enough to cause muscle to go into tight contraction. That spells "heart attack" if it goes through your heart.
Having measured myself, I know I'm 2.2 megaohms from one hand to the next. I'm told that, if you puncture the skin, that goes down to only a few ohms.
Seriously, Ben Bova wrote a couple of books on the political consequences of nanomachines. I thought that Slashdot, of all places, would have smaller percentage of nanoluddites than the general public. I mean, come on people. All technology comes with consequences. We usually accept these risks freely.
And, think about it. The types of nanotechnology Ben Bova described as dangerous were self-replicating. But aren't bacteria self-replicating? What about chemical explosions? Nuclear reactions?
The only types of nanomachines that are dangerous are those that perform only a minimal amount of precautions as to what specific things they can operate on.
Also, antidotes will come a lot more easily, should a nanomachine prove to have negative effects on health, there's no reason another nanomachine can't be built to specifically destroy the first. At the point when nanomachines become really useful, they'll be capable of recognizing entire molecules based on physical structure, not just on chemical properties. Nanomachines will be able to be built to specifically recognize the structure of the target nanomachine, and so developers will be able to precisely control what nanomachines will operate on.
Finally, I don't think people realize how difficult it will be to create a self-replicating nanomachine. It's a damned complicated process. It's not like computer viruses that can copy themselves with a hardcoded memcpy() command; self-replicating nanomachines would have to be able to build another copy of itself without using itself as a reference.
What's this Submit thingy do?
This problem of inhaled nanobots causing health problems was talked about in Neil Stephenson's book "The Diamond Age". In the same book, Neil Stephenson also mentioned armies of nanobots going in to kill harmful nanobots leading to a black soot like dust being created from all these dead nanobots, that shouldn't be inhaled.
On the other end of things, Ben Bova, in his book "Moonwar" describes certain humans having injected armies of nanobots into their body that would repair damage and fix problems.
Now if we were able to build "human repair nanobots" and everyone used them, wouldn't these repair nanobots cancel out the harmful effects of nanobots that shouldn't be in your body?
basically, use nanobots to fight nanobots, or defend against nanobots. I know that defense is usually used to mean fighting off a malicious aggressor, but its not neccessary.
- Tempestdata
Seriously, people are so concerned about health risks in EVERYTHING... nanoparticles are everywhere, all around us.. constantly.. why are we caring about them NOW.. we survived for thousands of years. What ever happened to natural selection? Oh that's right.. we put warning labels on everything in existance because some moron doesn't know that PreparationH is external only. Geez.. just take the warning labels off of everything and let the problem work itself out.
If you're looking here for something insightful or thought provoking, you're probably looking in the wrong place.