The Issues of Nano-Safety

Ineffable 27 writes "Today's New York Times has an interesting article looking at some of the emerging research into the health and safety risks of nanotech and nanomaterials." Free reg. blah blah. It's a decent article, but it's the same type of questions that groups like The Foresight Institute have been thinking about for a long long time now.

Comments

some other links

[stonebeat.org]

Here are some other links about issues with nano-tech http://www.theecologist.org/searchResults.html?arc hiveOnly=1&searchString=nanotechnology&Search=Sear ch and here is a one that talk abouts issues with brain implants to boost intelligence.

Yet another article

[Scalli0n]

Here's a link to the page, no login required:

LINK!

Sig & Below

Re:Yet another article

[Scalli0n]

In fact, I'll be a total KarmaWhore and just post the article right here too:

As Uses Grow, Tiny Materials' Safety Is Hard to Pin Down
By BARNABY J. FEDER

When researchers fashion nanomaterials so small that their dimensions can be measured in molecules, the unusual and potentially valuable characteristics of those materials tend to show up immediately. But as businesses race to exploit those benefits, investors and policy makers are finding that pinpointing the potential environmental and health impacts of nanotechnology could take years.

In fact, the first stages of environmental impact research are generating more new questions than answers.

Take the experience of researchers at DuPont, who are testing microscopic tubes of carbon, known as nanotubes, valued for their extraordinary strength and electrical conductivity. When the researchers injected nanotubes into the lungs of rats in the summer of 2002, the animals unexpectedly began gasping for breath. Fifteen percent of them quickly died.

"It was the highest death rate we had ever seen," said David B. Warheit, the research leader, who began his career studying asbestos and has been testing the pulmonary effects of various chemicals for DuPont since 1984.

Yet surprisingly, all the surviving rats seemed completely normal within 24 hours.

What initially looked like disaster pointed to a possible safety feature: the nanotubes' tendency to clump rapidly led to suffocation for some rats exposed to huge doses, but it also kept most tubes from reaching deep regions of the lung where they could not be expelled by coughing and could cause long-term damage. Now researchers see the clumping of carbon nanotubes and other nanomaterials as a new field for inquiry.

The DuPont research is among the most sophisticated efforts to date to examine potential hazards of nanoscale materials, generally defined as those with at least one dimension less than 100 nanometers (a nanometer is roughly the width of 10 hydrogen atoms). Such materials are already embedded in hundreds of products, including sunscreens and cosmetics, to make them clear; textiles, to make them stain-resistant; and power machinery, to add durability.

Early research has raised troubling issues. DuPont and others, for example, found evidence that the cells that break down foreign particles in rodent lungs have more trouble detecting and handling nanoparticles than larger particles that have long been studied by air pollution experts.

No one has yet created a realistic test for the effects of inhaled nanoparticles; such a test could easily cost more than $1 million to design and carry out, toxicologists say.

Lungs are not the only concern. Research shows that nanoparticles deposited in the nose can make their way directly into the brain. They can also change shape as they move from liquid solutions to the air, making it harder to draw general conclusions about their potential impact on living things.

"It's going to be 10 years before we can answer the 'so what should I do' question for people," said Eva Oberdorster, an aquatic toxicologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Last month, she began studying how the spherical carbon molecules known as buckyballs are absorbed by water fleas. Eventually, her research could clarify what effects, if any, release of such nanoparticles into the air and water to monitor or control pollution might have on the food chain.

"This field is in its infancy," agreed Joseph B. Hughes, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology who oversees environmental engineering research at the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology, which is at Rice University in Houston. "The first papers and first results will have to be cautious. The field is growing so rapidly in the discovery end that questions about their environmental consequences are still being generated."

Today's nanotechnology applications and those nearing commercialization use tiny amounts of the ma

Re:Viruses and playing God

[timbloid]

Not necessarily. We get errors in DNA transcription, breaks in DNA, badly transcribed DNA, genes that go crazy and replicate until the host dies, viruses that attack at the genetic level, and a whole host of other cellular and genetic faults.

It's just we have got better at patching these holes, and detecting bugs before they cause major harm... And the massive redundancy at the DNA level helps too...

We're more like a failover cluster than a single machine...

Don't dismiss peer-reviewed research so stupidly

[ClarkEvans]

I wonder what the mortality rate is for mice with common dirt released directly into their lungs?

Did you even bother to look for the actual research. I did a very quick search on google, and found this report. I'd love an actual link to the study, but I don't have time to do more searching.

This report talked about a study which compared particles of 20 nanometers (deadly) with ones of 130 nanometers (not deadly) in the same concentrations. Certainly these results are not perfect, a better study would make these nanoparticles into an areosol, as this would be the most likely form of real-life delivery.. that is, a light dust cloud breathed by a human after some object was moved containing nanotubes. In any case, I'm sure the same concentration of plain-old dirt would not even be noticed.

If you want to argue the results... do you own study. Oh wait, that was the point of the NY Times article wasn't it... that not enough studies were being done. Amazing.

Greenpeace report on Nanotechnology

[BrotherWolf]

Greenpeace UK commissioned a report into nanotechnology back in July 2003 which can be downloaded from here.

It was commissioned of Imperial College London with the brief that it should cover existing applications, current research and development - including the associated organisations with the incentives and risks they have for such initiatives.

Re:But will nanotech even be developed?

[memmel2]

Chemistry We do huge amounts of nanotech every day its the core of the modern world. I think most people don't realize that nanotech is more and extension of extremely well known chemical physics than and reduction in traditional manufacturing processes. The biggest difference between nanotech and chemsitry thats done every day is nanotech is about spatial specific reactions in a homogenous enviroment. In other words given a bunch of reactive molecules we would like to react the ones located at some coordinates. This means introducing some way to control the spatial extent of a reaction. The reactions themselves are fairly well understood. Spatial control is the big deal. I see two complementry approaches. Molecular masks which make the reaction take place in a nonhomogenous enviroment and protein like site sepicific catalysts. Molecular masks can be created at the juncture of two larger structures. For example you can grow two lines in silicon and lay down molecules in the furrow between the lines. The lines themselves may be large but the distance between the two could be on the nanometer scale. This mask then acts as and attachment point for the catalytic reactors. Finally the resulting reacted mask can itself be more complex masks/catalytic rectors. Viola nanotech.