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

Safety? Ha, who needs it!

[Anonymous Coward]

If we had thought about wussy things like "safety" back in the 40's we wouldn't have developed the atom bomb. And that, good sirs, would be a travesty, because there would have never been any Duke Nukem Games.

Disasters and benefits, oh my...

[tekiegreg]

A good book on the topic is "Nanotechnology: A Gentle Introduction to the Next Big Idea" (ISBN: 0131014005). In it some of the problems of Nanotech are discussed (in addition to the benefits of course).

IMHO though, this is just another snag in the means of progress. We develop Genetic engineering and people are suffering from allergies to Gene spliced tortillas (that was Del Taco IIRC), or for a worse idea, we develop advanced shipbuilding and watch the Titanic sink (over and over again...).

However will Nanotech help society as whole more than it will hurt? IMHO yes. Though it truly remains to be seen whether or not a bunch of Nano-bots will destroy us all from our insides (I think that was from the book), or a bunch of clumped Nano-tubes will get in our lungs (as the article said).

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.

We can hope

[nizo]

May a thousand nanobots attack the cells of anyone posting a "welcome our new nanobot overlord" post.

Seven of Nine

[dolo666]

You realize that by posting the New York Times article, this has become a story about Foresight, right?

Seven of Nine can't be the only thing sexy about Nanotech. It sounds wonderful, if you think about the possibilities of controlling the world at a molecular level. But what about the costing of Nanotech? This means that instead of charging for a lump sum of material, the manufacturers can charge by the molecule!

Talk about a get rich scheme!

So guys, how can we prevent this from getting out of hand?

Nanotech, appears to be all it's chalked up to be... a great new path for a new industrial revolution. Think of the ways we can help the environment, our bodies, our society. We could build pure substances, and refine better goods.

We could grow better fruits and vegetables.

We could clone better animals. :)

And what would it do to us? I think it's worth risking to find out.

Re:Seven of Nine

[Mysticalfruit]

That sounds fine and dandy, but I doubt without lots of major changes in goverance and distribution of power.

Lets just say tommorrow some researcher at [insert some amazing research facility] puts out a press release stating that they've found the key. They can assembler/disassemble on the atomic and molecular scale, the whole thing scales and they can control the whole thing reliably.

Firstly, do you think big business or government would ever let this technology get into the hands of Joe Average citizen?

The prospect that a citizen could in their home, with the proper compounds manufacture anything would scare the shit out of them.

Also, think of what it would do the economy.

What if, with my assembler and the plans I downloaded off the internet could assemble myself a Ferrari? The value of owning a Ferrari becomes nothing.

No more shipping, no more massive manufacturing.

I could download the blueprints and manufacture myself a book I wanted to read. Then when I'm done, I just throw the book back in the assembler and have it just disassemble it back into the base compounds. Download another book and use those compounds to manufature a new one.

Personally, I'd want one of these. This thing would be the ultimate recycler. Something like this would eclipse techniques like TDP for taking matter and coverting it back into its root atoms.

So, with that all said, you'd never have one of these in your home, and it's probably not for the reasons stated above. The government would be so scared that radicals of some kind would get their hands on this technology and use it to manufacture guns / explosives / etc.

So, yeah, I see this technolgy existing, I just don't ever see it in our hands. It'll be buried deeply in some manufacturing or recycling plant and it'll be licensed and heavily monitored.

Viruses and playing God

[Dancin_Santa]

Some would say that viruses are God's nanotech. Small, self-replicating, non-living, and very very potent. The damage that a virus can do to an ecosystem depends on its programming, but even the most mild of viruses can cause serious reactions in hosts.

I'm not sure that we have come to the point of understanding where we can control nanobots. If the biggest software company in the world can't put out a bug free software package, how can we expect that a handful of scientists to put together what is in effect a man-made virus. It would be a sad day if one of these (excuse the pun) bugs were released and some error was caught too late.

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...

Re:Viruses and playing God

[DG]

You said a magic phrase there: "self-replicating"

It is unlikely that any nanobots we'll be dealing with in the forseeable future will be self-replicating. In fact, I think the opposite problem - how to keep the damn things functional long enough to do their job - will be the more prevelent one.

As such, the major issue facing nanobots is more likely to be analogous to the "space junk" problem (what do you do about large numbers of "dead" nanobots) than to be a "gray goo" or "runaway virus" problem.

DG

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

One of my nanotech dreams.

[dark-br]

I imagined from the moment I heard of nanotech, that we could have devices implanted in ourselves that, when we're in the sun, could bring chlorophyll to the surface of our skins and create food from it. That way we can all use up CO2 from the atmosphere to offset the CO2 emissions of industry, and help industry along all the more!

We get the benefits of industry, with free food, and a way to combat one of the current downfalls of industry!

My other nanotech dream is that nanobots in my body could change me into a lesbian and I could go have hot lesbian sex each night, but I don't mention that one much

Stephenson's the Diamond age

[denubis]

To me, the most interesting part of any given technology are the cultural implications, especially as how with every advance in technology, our options become more manifest and manifold. (And if that last sentence didn't make sense, blame my cold.)

Stephenson's Diamond Age is a fascinating examination of this. Now, given that the book was written on a victorian framework (which shapes what issues are pondered) it is still an enjoyable read, and an even more enjoyable thought experiment into nanotech.

When people have the ability to build anything they want from the atom up, the only thing constraining us will be those constraints that our society dictates. (Everything else is merely requires sufficently talented engineers.) Unfortunatly, the dangerous aspects of nanotech also are only constrained by our society.

Worries about grey-goo scenarios and DNA plagues shouldn't stop us from researching nanotech -- if only for the reason that solutions to these problems can only be found through nanotechnological means.

Anyways, I digress -- for a fascinating study of nanotech, read the Diamond Age.

Re:Stephenson's the Diamond age

[denubis]

First, depends on what you mean by failure.
For the sake of this discussion of failure, you simply mean a given machine "doesn't work." And stops. For other instances of failure, other discussions should apply.

But, given that definition of failure, the beauty of nanotech is that we can create thousands of machines for any given task, and even if 10% fail right off the bat, we've still got a ton of machines to do our work for us. Even if they do fail -- it's just a few dozen/hundred molecules of junk floating around (which, admitedly poses an issue to our lungs, but that's a mere detail.)
The probability of failure increases only if the bots requre each and every bot around them to work. If the bots simply work alone (or in small groups) the probability of failure is a constant, not a limit.

If I mis-understood what you said, please enlighten me to your true arguments. I'm under the influence of a nasty head cold and dayquil right now, so my thinking might be ... odd.

Re:Stephenson's the Diamond age

[Tim C]

Indeed - but such failure need not be catastrophic. By the same logic, with the billions upon billions of bits stored on a hard drive, the probability of failure is 1 - but I can still successfully store data on it. With the number of atomic and subatomic particles that make me up, the probability of radioactive decay is almost certainly extremely high - but I'm still here, and I don't have cancer.

Likewise, the failed nanobots may simply not work at all - just floating lifelessly until they're destroyed, by natural means or otherwise. Failing that, perhaps every usage of nanobots will be accompanied by a "dose" of hunter/killer ones, designed specifically to seak out and destroy malfunctioning nanobots.

I agree that care should be taken, but I also agree with the OP that the research should definitely be performed.

Re:Stephenson's the Diamond age

[kirkjobsluder]

When people have the ability to build anything they want from the atom up, the only thing constraining us will be those constraints that our society dictates. (Everything else is merely requires sufficently talented engineers.) Unfortunatly, the dangerous aspects of nanotech also are only constrained by our society.When people have the ability to build anything they want from the atom up, the only thing constraining us will be those constraints that our society dictates. (Everything else is merely requires sufficently talented engineers.) Unfortunatly, the dangerous aspects of nanotech also are only constrained by our society.

Nanobots in the form of bacteria, have been on the Earth for billions of years. The extensive history of activity at this scale deflates both the claims of grey goo pessimists and the claims of boundless possibility constrained only by society. Regardless of the talent of engineers, physics and chemestry pose some very hard constraints on what is possible.

Re:Safety?

[dark-br]

I hope nanotech doesn't eventuate for at least another century. The regulations to ensure it doesn't get out of control aren't in place and I don't see anyone beginning to care much about this for a long time. Read information here. When people are injured by normal technology, they are just injured or killed and the rest of the world moves on. When people will be injured by nanotech, the changes will be small perhaps undetectable even, but could involve controlled changes to things as basic to us as humans as our DNA, the food we eat, and our brain systems Government rewiring of our brains some day? Can't be too far in the future.

Nanotechology disposal

[burgburgburg]

Don't ask, don't tell is the operating mode for much of the nanotechnology industry these days when it comes to where discarded products end up. Many companies assume that because they are working with compounds that are deemed safe in larger sizes or because the nanomaterials are embedded in larger products, the particles will not pose environmental threats.

So, let me see if I get it: We haven't proven our nanotech products are safe, but nobody can afford to prove that they aren't. Since there is no proof that they aren't, we'll assume they're safe and dump them wherever it's cheapest. By the time anyone can prove that they aren't safe, we'll have made our money and then some.

Re:Nanotechology disposal

[BurritoJ]

Actually, you've got it backwards. It is impossible to prove something safe. In order to do so you have to prove that it has no dangerous properties whatsoever. The more useful test is to prove it dangerous. This is like our legal system, the decision is not innocent/not innocent(safe/not safe), it's guilty/not guilty (dangerous/not dangerous).

There is no product or substance that is 'safe'. Water drowns, oxygen burns (or makes other things burn), helium... that should be safe, it just makes your voice high and squeaky... unless there is too much of it and it displaces the oxygen (oops).

Everything has problems and causes risks, we have to avaluate those risks and mitigate them as best we can. We cannot ignore every advancement because it may be dangerous.

FUD

[BurritoJ]

The surest way to stifle innovation is to demand that the innovator prove that the invention will cause no harm. As we all know, proving a negative is a daunting task and 'harm' is a nebulous concept. All articles like this do is spread FUD. Fear of the unknown, Uncertainty about the future, and doubt in the benefits of progress.

To me

[Anonymous Coward]

There is one, and only one, thing that makes me positively scared of Nanotechnology.

And that is at the time that it becomes technologically and economically feasible, Microsoft will probably still be around.

But will nanotech even be developed?

[mongbot]

Before we start looking into the safety of nanotechhnology, I think the question of whether nanotech will ever be feasible should be addressed. Here are a few basic problems that I've yet to see any solutions for:
1. How is energy going to be supplied to the nanobots?
2. How are the nanobots going to be produced, economically?
3. How are they going to move (wheels, flying)?

I don't understand why there is so much emphasis on such a poorly-defined field of technology that has shown so little promise so far. The smaller you make things, the more difficult and expensive they are to produce. Nanotechnology seems to be just a convenient "magic" technology useful only for SF writers.

Re:But will nanotech even be developed?

[Michael Crutcher]

You know those things in your body called cells? The ones that run on sugars, create copies of themselves, and propel themselves with various techniques (flagella, cilia, etc.)?

Those are pretty damn small, and they seem to work ok. Cells may or may not be nanotechnology depending on your definition but there are definately precedents in nature that show us that nanotechnology is feasible. Viruses might be a better (smaller) example.

Re:But will nanotech even be developed?

[denubis]

Energy -- probably batteries. We're talking about very small scale here, so a nice room-temp supercon (which since we're talking about nanotech, isn't all that far-fetched) should provide for power requirements.
Produced, by other nano-assemblers.

Nanoassemblies should be the cheapest and most efficient production system around -- having many many many small machines "placing" molecules on an on-demand fasion (generally at the place of consumption.) What else do you need? There are no middle-men, there are no shipping costs, there are no store costs. Simply ship atoms and some quantity of data to you, and poof! you've got whatever.

How are they going to move? Depends on the structure and the task, just like things of today. Flying is trivial for nanotech, since (assuming sufficently strong nanotech production abilities) it's really easy to make things lighter than air. Once you do that, simply add 3 turbines going through the center of the device for thrust, and poof!.

The principle premise of true "nanotech" is that we can create machines on the molecular level. Given that the initial machines will probably be quite expensive, the initial machines can then make the next generation of machines that make machines (etc..) simply at the cost of a little energy and the moluecules necessary. Nothing else. Miniturization is only a pain when you're talking about going from a macro scale to a micro/nano scale. When your assembly lines operate on that scale, making things on the same scale is trivial.

Re:But will nanotech even be developed?

[asparagus]

1) Most modern nanotech is fixed, a.k.a. it comes with batteries that cannot be replaced. Once the device runs out of power, it dies.

2) The long-term theory is to create self-replicating, self-powering nanobots, which solves problem #1 and #2 at the same time. If you can produce a single one, then all you need is a tub of oil/whatever energy source and raw materials. Drop one in, come back ten hours later, and you're good to go. It's like drug research: making that first pill is a PITA, but after that duplication brings the price down.

3) Depends on the application. Most of this stuff doesn't really need to move, though. It's more of a shotgun approach to solving a problem (throw the nanites in the area) rather than a highly-targeted solution.

Re the rest: quantum computers have yet to show up conventional machines: should we give up research on them?

Re:But will nanotech even be developed?

[Dr. GeneMachine]

Miniturization is only a pain when you're talking about going from a macro scale to a micro/nano scale. When your assembly lines operate on that scale, making things on the same scale is trivial.

Right. And, conveniently, we don't even have to fully go from macro to nano-scale - biological systems can supply us with many of the tools needed for nanoscale assembly. There is a lot of promising work done in the field of self-assembling nanostructures on DNA and protein basis.

Some minor nitpicks, though. I don't think that the concept of a battery in the classical sense is applicable on this scale. Energy supply will have to be organized in a more biological kind of fashion - just put your nanomachine in some kind of energy gradient, be it thermal or chemical in nature. The first generation of nanomachines will undoubtely be stationary anyway, so you could put them on top of a membrane separating for example a high-proton from a low-proton medium and let them harvest energy from the proton flux along the gradient - again a working concept established in many biological systems, for example bacteria or mitochondria.

For the same reason, I would not be concerned about movement at this stage. Later, though, I don't think it will be as simple as you put it. On the nanoscale, the fluid behavior of gaseous media is completely different from what we know, so your put-in-turbines-and-let-them-fly concept most probably won't work. But, again, we can look to biology - flagella and cilia are quite efficient ways of propulsion in media of relatively high viscosity.

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.

Re:But will nanotech even be developed?

[198348726583297634]

he long-term theory is to create self-replicating, self-powering nanobots

doesn't that seem like an awfully large problem, though? can we even make useful robots at normal scale that self-replicate? this seems like the barrier of the sort of faster-than-light travel. possible intheory, but so far remved from what we can do that it pushes the things beyond it into the realm of pure speculation. (which is, of course, a fine activity, but let's not confuse it with things connected to thereal world.)

Re:But will nanotech even be developed?

[asreal]

This is the field I work in. Policy research in nano- and bio-tech. With biotech, the technology arrived before we had policy in place to deal with it. This was a Very Bad Thing as it led to rushed decisions, inadequate planning, and general nastiness. (Gene patents anyone?)

With nanotech, the policy people are trying to stay ahead of the curve. This will mean that once the technology is ready, we will already have the details taken care of. There will be some changes, but the methods of shaping the arguments and the policies will be established, making things much easier, safer, and more productive for everyone.

A little too forward-thinking?

[192939495969798999]

It seems a little early to worry about nano-bot safety when regular occupational workplace safety, especially with respect to smoking cigarettes and alcohol consumption issues, are still widely protested. In other words, you'll die of lung cancer before a miniature robot accidentally recombines your DNA.

Re:thinking about for a long long time now...

[BrookHarty]

The article shows how companies look at the numbers, rather sad.

First.
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.

Then.

the federal government's projection that sales of products based on nanotechnology will reach $1 trillion by 2015

Can you say

[djupedal]

NANOSHA ...?

Wesley Crusher

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought we already learned our lessons about nanotechnology when Wesley fell asleep. In the end all our problems will be solved by tachyons.

DPH

Re:Wesley Crusher

[freeze128]

I thought it was a dose of gamma radiation that killed the nanytes. Still, be careful. Too much gamma radiation can turn you large and green....

You missed the 15% mortality rate thing

[burgburgburg]

Right at the beginning of the article was the discussion of the 15% mortality rate of mice exposed to nanotubes. It was, according to the DuPont researcher leader, "the highest death rate we had ever seen" (and this is a man who started out researching asbestos). Seems they clump up in the lungs and this suffocated 15% of the mice. This doesn't seem nebulous. This seems quite specific.

And I'll note that 24 hours later, the other 85% seemed perfectly healthy, the assumption being that the nanotubes clumping stopped them from getting into deep regions of the lungs and allowed them to be expelled by coughing.

So, with specifics of 15% mortality in mice from nanotube exposure, does that warrant concern?

How is this article FUD?

[ClarkEvans]

But the $4 million it expects to award next year for risk studies is barely measurable against the $847 million in federal money that President Bush has proposed for nanotechnology research and development for the 2004 fiscal year.

Couple this with the fact that companies will be more than willing to invest their own dollars in nanotechnology (but not studying risks), it is clear that we are not doing enough to study the environmental impacts of such stuff. This is brand new territory, with new rules and new concequences. It is stupid to think that the old rules to protect people and the environment will be adequate. Environmental messes are *horribly* expensive to clean up by comparison.

To call this FUD is really irresponsible. You don't jump in head first to a pool of water unless you know how deep the pool is, no?

This is old, old, old news

[smoyer]

There are two must-read items for people who want to understand nano-technology; Richard Feinmans 1959 paper "There's room at the bottom" and Eric K. Drexler's "Engines of Creation" (from the 1980s).

While Feinman doesn't touch on the negatives of nano-technology, much of Drexler's ground breaking book is related to developing nano-machines WITHOUT risk to the human race.

Unpredictable nanobots

[mariox19]

Anyone who thinks there is no downside to this technology is kidding themselves.

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.

Nano-Safety

[Griim]

1) Don't leave lid open on 'experimental' nanites while working late-night on a school project.

2) Should this happen, be sure to let an adult know immediately instead of trying to quietly solve the problem yourself.

3) Should they multiply and infect the computer core, do not try to fry them out of the core; results will be disastrous.

Re:thinking about for a long long time now...

[linzeal]

The parent is not a troll. Scare tactics may have a stimulating effect on any industries budget from the increased level of stockholder and public concern. This is not bad press. The oil companies say, "We have to make double hull tankers now after the E-Valdez; we will pass on the costs to you." No one argues with this, because they can't in a market economy. Our only method of protest is to organize boycotts which never materialize (at least in the US).

Re:Safety? Ha, who needs it!

[Dirtside]

If you've been following the progress of Duke Nukem Forever, you might come to the conclusion that there still aren't any Duke Nukem games!