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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.
I would say that, on the whole, nanoparticle cookie cutters sound extremely bad for your health.
Just ask Jack Putter how dangerous nanoscale particles can be!
we were suposed to inhale/ingest nano machines. thats how they get in our bodies to help us.
Beer Die is the game of champions Learning To walk my own path.
Maybe there's a future for Nanoscale Particles in home gardening and pest control, too? ;-)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I feel like there are these other things that we are inhaling all the time that have variants that are both good and bad....
what are they called... something with a V and another with a B...
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
(full article:)
Research Shows Hazards in Tiny Particles By BARNABY J. FEDER
A new review of research on nanoscale materials suggests that tiny particles are often toxic because of their size and are likely to pose health hazards, especially to workers making them.
Dr. Vyvyan Howard, a pathology specialist at the University of Liverpool who examined results from 27 studies published since 1984, said that the type of material a particle is made of appears to be much less related to how hazardous it is than its size at such small scales.
Dr. Howard said that nanoscale particles, which are made up of tens to thousands of molecules and are far smaller than human cells, are easily ingested, inhaled or absorbed through the skin.
"I suppose that's something those working in the field would rather not hear but that's no reason not to say it," Dr. Howard said.
Dr. Howard's conclusions are to be released today by the ETC Group, an opponent of rapid nanotechnology development that asked him to perform the research review. ETC has been advocating, among other things, that production of nanotechnology products be put on hold until more data is available on potential health impacts. The report is available at www.etcgroup.org.
Nanoscale materials are already used in products as diverse as sun-blocking lotions, tennis balls, computer displays and paneling on cars. The range of potential applications has been expanding rapidly as researchers discover valuable and sometimes unexpected results by shrinking common materials, including extra strength and flexibility, new electrical properties and transparency.
Nanotechnology backers and researchers in the United States and Europe have repeatedly disagreed with the kinds of conclusions reached by Dr. Howard and there is no public support in the business community for any sort of moratorium.
"People who worry excessively underestimate the number of natural materials that size that have surrounded us for years," said Greg Blonder, a partner in the Morgenthaler venture capital firm. "It requires the usual good care but I don't see any new or unique threat."
Nanotechnology companies said that the havoc that asbestos claims have created in industry has made businesses extremely sensitive to the health impact of new materials. Halting development to perform health studies would simply send nanotechnology development offshore, they said.
It's not as if this were being put out by a group which, oh, say, was interested in opposing the rapid development of Nanotech...
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
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
inhalation of experimental compounds discovered harmful!
;-)
Seriously, rule number one of any lab is "don't sniff that stuff" followed by "don't eat it or rub it on yourself, either."
"Don't give research grants to study dangerous nanotechnology, give the grants to me and I will conduct a study into why many more health studies are required to determine the risk."
Stop all research, bleh. Nano stuff isn't dangerous like gen-enged germs (unless you believe in the grey goo catastrophe), it is dangerous like many other fine particles, like asbestos and such. It warrants careful handling, not banning.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Why every time something new comes out, there are people who propose halting it until the most fantastic claims are investigated. If this sort of stop-now/ask-questions-forever approach becomes law, it'll bog down all R&D for all time, and ruin the world economy simultaneously.
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
so, if they cut his reads would they finish the sentence for him?
T
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
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
just ask Scully and Mulder... the Kryczek guy is the culprit!
Since when have we EVER stopped research in a scientific field to check out health concerns first?
Give me a break...
For the record, I think we need to have a clear understanding of the basics in any specific field before we can even think about doing research on environmental and health issues. Imagine trying to determine the effect of internal combustion engine on the environment before you've actually built one. Kinda hard, no?
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Look, merely because all of the potential positive effects of nanotechnology are being extolled by supporters doesn't mean that micro scale objects pose no health threats. Considering the emphasis that the EPA and environmental organizations are putting on the health hazards of particulate matter, it's a good idea to examine the potential problems here. Some might argue that nanotech particles would be too small to pose a significant threat, but something that small could easily work it's way into structures in the human body previously accessible only by other types of cells. I don't know about you, but I shudder to think of the potential damage that could be done to the air sacs in lungs just from breathing in "clouds" of these structures, even if benign. I'm not saying that nanotech is bad; just that thinking of it as totally benign is foolish.
The file looks much smaller than 726kb.. Did I lose the other half?
You probably have your machine running in 64 bit mode, reboot in 32 bit mode and everything should be fine..
Trolling is a art,
Also, it wasn't pubilshed in a peer-reviewed forum - generally a good indication of poor science.
Quack!Quack!.....QUACK!!
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
Particles smaller than 10 mm in diameter can be inhaled , and particals smaller than 2.5 mm in diameter can be inhaled into the lungs. Ultra Fine Particles (UFP) are smaller than 0.1 mm in diameter and they have been linked with respiratory problems such as asthma.
The fine particals are the main problem with diesel engines.
Independence? That's middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth. G.B Shaw
Nanotechnology is key to the development of 21st century industry much as the transistor was to the latte rhalf of the 20th century. According to the paper, BASF is working on a toothpaste that has enamel built into it. Those worrying about having hydroxyapetite crystals enter the body don't seem to worry about the mercury in fillings potentially causing Minamata (methyl mercury ==> degenerative brain) disease. Nanocrystals are already being employed for medical research, one lab at Vanderbilt is already exploring their potential use as a tracking system for neurological tumors and disease since they can circumvent the blood-brain barrier.
New polymers and materials are also unlikely to enter commercial use if they disintegrate so quickly that inhaling notable quantities becomes a problem. If they're flaking off in the air they'd as likely disintegrate on cantact with water. Buckyballs could be a potential health threat but does that stop people from trying to build star ladders / space elevators out of their derivative materials? Of course not. Look at the benefits from material science over the last decade just using alloys derived from Cold War technology of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. We stand at the threshold of potential miracles in medicine (implants that don't get rejected), computing (micronized computers...imagine if today's Game Boy became tommorow's ENIAC), and many other fields.
Of course there will be toxic derivatives of some new materials, after all LSD was discovered by people looking for cold medicines and heroin was discovered when Bayer wanted a more potent pain reliever than morphine. Care should be taken not to let certain materials into the environment, but that can be done by covered, sealed hoods with gloves or mabe this is an incentive to develop better filtering systems (could work against biochem agents too...). Keep the research going and just remember to apply common sense when working with dangerous chemicals.
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
True, it would be easy to ingest (or otherwise innoculate yourself with) nanothings. However, the one saving grace could be that they wouldn't neccesarily self-replicate. So, however little you ingest is "all" you need to worry about. If a few nanowidets "escaped" from the lab and infected someone in the general population, there shouldn't be as urgent of a threat of it spreading, unlike viruses or bacteria.
:)
Of course, the threat that makes me shudder is the idea of weaponizing nanotech. Although it wouldn't necessarily be a weapon of mass destruction, it would certainly have some frightening capabilities... like being able to control just when the actual "attack" on your body took place, how much damage was done, etc. But this was all addressed in an X-Files episode, so there's nothing more to be said.
This is insightful?
I've got a list of dangerous things too. How about:
Fire
Rocks
Sharp sticks
Screw drivers
Cars
Planes
Rocks dropped from planes
etc.
etc.
etc.
Because something has the potential to be dangerous is not a valid argument for not researching it. If that argument was applied 10,000 years ago we'd still be getting eaten by wolves and mauled by buffalo.
If you think nuclear energy is dangerous do some research into the number of deaths related to the burning of fossil fuels, the mining of coal, the extraction and transportation of oil & gas. Its all dangerous.
This has also been reported at the American Chemical Society Meeting in New Orleans. See the report
Service, RF. "Nanomaterials show signs of toxicity." Science [yes, _Science_] April 11, 2003: 243.
Groups from Johnson Space Center and DuPont report that single-walled carbon nanotubes cause scarring in mouse lungs.
"DDT is perfectly safe"(films in the '50s show kids, sitting at picnic tables, getting fogged with DDT, grinning ear to ear. DDT is later shown to cause all manner of health problems)
"PCBs won't cause widescale pollution" (PCBs found to migrate in wildlife half-way across the globe from a single source)
"Nuclear power is completely safe."(3-mile island, Chernobyl, and countless accidents of one kind or another at US facilities, not to mention millions of tons of deadly radioactive waste that we still haven't figured out what to do with. Don't even get me started on the secretive testing they did on mental institution patients.)
"MBTE is a great way to meet emissions goals!"(too bad it pollutes the water table faster than you can say 'aquifer', and is a known carcinogen. Next time you fill up, look for that nice little "this gas may contain MTBE" sticker. Do a search on "MTBE health hazards" on google some time. That electric car looking better all of the sudden?)
"Asbestos is a great material to use in brake pads, clutches, fire curtains in theaters, insultation on pipes..." (asbestos is now 100% proven to cause lung cancer)
"Lobotomies are a great way to cure mental illness"
Oh, and the greatest of them all, "Cigarettes don't cause cancer." Let's throw in alcohol, too, since both are poisons(and, as a whole, people can't seem to handle alcohol responsibly- I'd be surprised if the death count from alcohol-related deaths isn't higher than cigarettes.)
That's just a small sampling of some of the gems that have come from both the scientific community and industry, often both. Why should we trust them now? These days, you should be forced to prove your product is safe, since time after time scientists and industry have proven themselves incapable of putting safety in front of "progress" and financial interests.
Please help metamoderate.
Inhaling sharp-edged little particles has never been good for your health. Doesn't matter if they're manufactured or not. Take silicosis, for example.
We've got a huge diatomaceous earth plant in the next town over, and even though it's amorphous silica, I've heard you can still get some lung problems from breathing a lot of it for long enough.
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.
From the ETC Group website:
"ETC group is dedicated to the conservation and sustainable advancement of cultural and ecological diversity and human rights. To this end, ETC group supports socially responsible developments of technologies useful to the poor and marginalized and it addresses international governance issues and corporate power."
(http://www.etcgroup.org/about.asp)
Beware of any research backed by a political action group. Emotions tend to outweight and warp data.
68% of all satistics are wrong!
My karma is in a nose dive
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.
> All technology comes with consequences. We usually accept these risks freely.
Translation: we usually don't bother to assess these risks until we've already deployed the technology.
> 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.
Translation: I am incapible of coming up with any possible risks from other kinds of nanomachines in 15 seconds of thought, so clearly there aren't any.
Translation of the entire post: Listen to me! I didn't read the article!
Basically, if you have a bunch of really tiny stuff and you breathe it in, it doesn't matter what function it's performing at the time... it can screw up your lungs. If you have a bunch of pieces of a defunct nanomachine wandering around in your bloodstream, it can cause truly entertaining effects in a truly entertaining variety of places. If you absorb interestingly coherant nanomachine parts through your skin, interesting things can happen.
Parallels have already been drawn to asbestos and fibreglass.
And here you are, saying that the only kind of nanomachine that is at all dangerous is a self-replicating one. Oh, wait, maybe that's the only thing that Ben Bova thought were dangerous... he's a sci-fi writer, he must be right, huh?
Well, there's always Neil Stephenson... remember the 'toner' in one of his books? How much good d'ya suppose that does your lungs?
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
I work in nanoscience. There is no reason to even mention nanomachines right now. What we work with is dirt. I was very glad that this article knew that.
One of the most advanced nanotechnology fabrication techniques out there is to burn pure graphite at a high temperature quickly. Use specific gasses/temperatures/pressures to get desired nanotube characteristics.
Yup, that's scary stuff. Ash. Dirt. I'm afraid.
The article wasn't bad, it had it's points, but except for nanotubes, every example of nanotechnology it gave was really just saying: hey this dirt we found over here, yeah, it might not be good for us. I think that should be pretty obvious to mankind at this point. We're beyond the dirt eating stage of evolution.
Nano-particles are things we've been dealing with since the industrial revolution. I'm not going to pretend that they're all perfectly safe, I have no idea. To treat the field any differently than chemistry, or solid state physics is crazy. People don't go around inhaling things in chemistry labs.
I do think that we should be looking at the health hazards that might accompany nanotechnology. What I got out of the PDF was that quite a few people are doing that. That makes me warm and fuzzy inside, I feel like we are being responsible scientests and not recommending anything for mass production before we know what it does.
The alarmist tone of the article is completely undeserved. The amount of material we work with in the lab is insignificant. The only real commercial nanotechnology product is titanium dioxide, which was developed as a SAFE replacement for lead in paint quite a while ago.