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Should Nanotech Be Regulated?
Memorize writes "Josh Wolfe writes an article in Forbes arguing that it is too early to regulate nanotech. Wolfe is worried that the 'green gang' (his term for environmentalists) are going to regulate nanotech out of existence before the technology even works in the lab. It seems like much of the discussion of nanotech is hype, including the potential benefits, such as immortality and the potential dangers such as grey goo. However, nanotech does hold some promise of environmental benefits such as cheap solar power. Are the risks real, and if so, is it worth the risk?" From the article: "There are rumblings that regulations are needed. They say they want to guarantee the safety of the technology and instill confidence in the general public."
Well, given that CNTs seem to be a perfect size to get lodged in the lungs, I wouldn't want the industry to be exposing itself to an asbestos-style situation.
What a crazy random happenstance!
The problem with regulation of nearly anything is it only stops honest people. Usually, the people that weren't going to do anything wrong in the first place.
Now that's a death ray!
Heh. This article is nothing but yet another libertarian call for unlimited dog-eat-dog capitalism. Then again, what else can you expect from Forbes?
Of course anything that has as monumental potential consequences as nanotech needs at least proper societal debate -- even when it's still in discovery and development stage. What are we going to do if the promises and nightmares come true? Furthermore, in the case of nanotech we would not only need government scrutiny but international governmental scrutiny and control. You don't have to be a greenie to realize that.
The fact that the people doing the debate do not understand the scientific details has nothing to do with their eligibility to participate in the debate. We already have referendums concerning whether we should build new fission plants and a perfectly valid argument against such a plant is: I don't want nuclear waste buried in my backyard for my grandchildren to take care of. You don't have to be a nuclear scientist to have something meaningful to say in a sociological/political sense. The same goes for nanotech.
So why is this guy saying that we shouldn't have public discussion (not referendums, mind you) about such a revolutionary technology as nanotech? Because it makes the profitmongering more difficult. That's why. The part of the article that I quoted above summarizes the attitude of the author perfectly: "shut up, shut up, shut up - I can make a lot of money with this, so you've better shut up about anything negative we might face when developing nanotech".
And where is that nasty Green Gang anyway? All sources I can see him quoting are respectable research organizations like the British Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering. If his beef is with scientists who're capable of thinking green in any other context than a dollar bill, he's the one who's risking the nanotech revolution.
The owls are not what they seem
However, an earlier report has shown conclusively that just about any substance will cause brain damage in fish, provided that enough of said substance is introduced into their little brain cases.
Seriously, though...just how much fullerene was used in this study? From www.nanomedicine.com:
I really sympathize with the hippie tree-huggers....honestly, I do. My personal opinion is that all industry should eventually be moved offplanet, and the earth itself converted into one big park. But that goal's quite a ways off, and without important technologies like nanotech, we simply aren't going to make it. These Luddite environmentalists who foam at the mouth at the mention of every new technology, and attempt to instill the same irrational, knee-jerk mentality in the general populace are not helping their species, or Mother Earth. Another point in their disfavor: every prohibition simply creates another underground. There's big money to be made in nanotech, and if people can't do it legally, they'll do it illegally, and I'm betting that the people who are bold enough to disregard the regulations won't really put too much thought...not to mention funds...into safety.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
There is no such thing as "nanotech". Nanotech was an unfulfilled pipe dream about "molecular assemblers" and the like. Of course, Wolfe is just trying to make money off the name as well; he is trying to present this as a brand new industry that is at risk of being stifled.
Because nanotech was such an abysmal failure, in order for people to save face and sell old research as new, the term has now been applied to traditional areas of material science and molecular biology. Whether those areas need to be regulated and how needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis.
For example, releasing new materials into the environment, in particular dusts and coatings that can turn into dust, should be subject to stricter regulations--whether "nanoengineered" or just chemical, that sort of thing is a health risk.
Molecular biology generally has regulations in place already; applying the moniker "nanotech" to molecular biology should not let companies or researchers evade those regulations.
More generally, however, I don't subscribe to the notion that a new industry (even if "nanotech" were a new industry rather than just good old chemistry and material science) should not be stifled; if it's potentially dangerous, of course, its growth should be stifled until we know how to mitigate the dangers.
As the technology matures, it will become easier and easier to do virtually anything with nanotech. So, eventually, it will be abused. (Which I assume is what people are worried about.)
The question we SHOULD be asking is how can we develop nanotechnology in such a way as to make sure we can stop dangerous/malicious applications. Because they WILL happen. There are just too many people on this planet for any kind of control to succeed in general on such matters. I suspect in the end nanotechnology will become another kind of virus, and it will take something like nanoengineered biological defenses to stop them, which will have to be continually upgraded.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
You mean, just like how genetically modified foods was handled?
This stuff now pervades many aspects of our everyday eating habits, yet I can't find out about it, and I don't know the risks or benefits.
The "people who know what they're talking about" are often people firmly entrenched in companies that are out to make a buck, and are possibly more than willing (as history has proven) to ignore potential dangers in that quest. Do you trust Monsanto to tell you the god's honest truth about GM foods?
The biggest problem here was that there was next-to-no public debate about it. These companies are even resisting a requirement to label foods as GM foods! This is ridiculous! It eventually comes down to individual choice, so it makes more sense to get involved sooner rather than later.
The more this is done under public scrutiny, the more we can verify that companies or special interest groups are not bribing or unduly influencing public officials. Or do you think it's a wise idea to have accounting crooks shaping national energy policies behind closed doors to suit their own motives?
The major issue with nanotech in the next few decades won't be a grey goo problem or any other sci-fi apocalypse. The biggest problem will be the toxic garbage mentioned in the article. Self replicating nanobots are still in the distant (20+ years) future but the problem with nanoparticles exists now. Some of the artifical dust being created by the nanotech manufacturing processes is small enough to pass through the various safeguards that organisms have evolved to protect against the environment. Very few things in nature are self contained objects on a nanometer scale so organisms never had a chance to evolve protection against the things we are creating. There is a valid risk of a problem similar to asbestos related cancers and DDT if nanotech becomes widespread before the proper safeguards are in place. I fully support nanotech and do believe the grey goo fears are overstated, but toxic dust is something that people should figure out how to deal with before it becomes dangerous.
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Wired article as proof
Great thinking. Let's take the debate out of the hands of the people who know what they're talking about, and put it firmly in the hands of John Q. Public.
I for one won't welcome our new technocratic overlords.
People who know nothing about nanotechnology except for the fact that a manufactured particle can damage the environment just don't know as much about the issue as people who have been studying nanotechnology for years.
True. But people who are promoters of the technology can't be entrusted with decsions that affect society as a whole either. Even "experts" in nanotechnology aren't necessarily experts in environmental impact. They aren't necessarily experts in human health. The problem when it comes to assessing widespread commercialization of a technology like this becomes interdisciplinary. Who will enforce that this debate takes place? Mr. Special Interest pushing against unwashed John Q. Public who is whipped into a frenzy by Snidely Politician, Esq.
If you want a better system, do something for your local elementary school, shake, stir, then wait twenty years and hope things turn out beter.
I'm not saying that it's a mistake to involve society at large in a matter like this, but experts' opinions are going to be the most well-informed, and therefore the most valuable.
Well, I'm not sure what you propose then.
The fact is, venal politicians will try to sieze on an issue one way or the other. The answer is not to discourage debate, but to encourage more of it. The power of the "opinion makers" to convince society of all kinds of malarkey doesn't come from vigorous public debate, but the lack of it.
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Outright banning or heavily restricting a particular field of research is the fastest way to create a technological divide and be swept away by the pace of advancement, and at the rate it's going that means the country in discussion will be left in the dust in a handful of years.
You can't question the ethical nature of a technology itself and restrict it appropriately and also have progress. Would nuclear technology have advanced if they were worrying about the very long term consequences? You might argue that nuclear facilities haven't helped us all that much, and have done quite a bit of damage, but we also couldn't be taking steps toward fusion without learning from our mistakes with fission.
Essentially, the countries that take the risks and have the courage to step into unknown territory are going to see the biggest returns the fastest, since ultimately nanotech offers to return more resources than those expended getting to it. Meanwhile, anyone who pussyfoots around is going to find themself quickly losing military, economic, and technological prowess.
The Immortality Institute
Too right.
"Leave the regulation to the industry who knows it best" - er, hello, conflict of interest anyone?
I don't want to regulate new technology out of existence, but at the same time, I don't want lack of regulation allowing big corps to go ahead and do exactly what they want without any accountability and/or assessment of the risks.
We're not talking about regulating scientists here, we're talking about regulating corporations.
Gimme a break folks and do your science.
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By now we should have had multiple nuclear wars
The worst case scenario was "nuclear winter" which implied one game only.
would have extreme shortages of food
Developing Countries
# 815 million people are undernourished
# 1.2 billion people live on less than $1/day
# 153 million children under age 5 are underweight
* 11 million children under age 5 die every year, over half of hunger-related causes
# 1 in 6 people is hungry
# 1 in 4 people lacks safe drinking water
would be all dying from pollution
Europe's children dying from pollution
would no thave enough oxygen to breathe
Decreased oxygen content in the atmosphere--an ecological disaster imperceptibly sneaking up?
Gimme a break folks and do your science.
Well.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
The only evidence he offers is that people were worrying that buckyballs might cause cancer, and the NSF is funding toxicity studies. And the British are also interested in studying nanoparticle toxicity. So what?
But he also offers this, from the same source from which he gets his scary "wide societal debate" quote:So a small Canadian corporate watchdog group with an unsuccessful record of opposing biotech holds an extreme position on nanotechnology. Oooh, I'm scared!
This link found in the article is rather telling:With your subscription for the special introductory price of only $195 (a 67% discount off the cover price), you will receive 12 monthly hard-copy issues of the author's Nanotech Report delivered right to your door. No doubt each issue will be filled with screeching about nonexistent political threats to nanotechnology from powerful Canadians.
Einstein once said "You don't really understand something until you can explain it to your grandmother."
If the techies can't put it in layman's terms, they don't understand the material well enough themselves. And considering that the people who have to live in the world with this stuff ARE John and Jane Q. Public, if you don't want them showing up at your doorstep with pitchforks and torches, you need their buy in early.
If a technology is safe and effective, consumer resistance is as long as their attention span. The technology will be used, it may just be 20 years later.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
So buckyballs may be bad for you? Not exactly a big surprise--there are buckyballs in soot, after all, and breathing soot is not beneficial.
For the most part, nanotechnology is just a novel approach to doing chemistry--creating molecular assemblies of atoms. It makes possible some novel chemistry, and there will probably be some novel hazards, but there's nothing to indicate that there is some kind of "generic" hazard as is the case with radioactivity, where many different isotopes emit only a handful of energetic particles. So it makes no sense to try to create generic regulations for nanotechnology.
So we're going to have to investigate the risks of nanosubstances just the way we investigate the risks of biological substances (which are just "evolved organic nanotechnology," anyway) and new chemical compounds--case by case. A company that wants to discharge some nanotechnological waste should be subject to exactly the same scrutiny as a company that wants to discharge a new chemical. Eventually, we'll probably begin to figure out whether particular classes of nanosubstances have particular hazards, like asbestos or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. But targeting nanotechnology per se for some sort of heightened scrutiny is just obstructionist fear of new technology.
When they were first testing nuclear bombs, scientist and Govt decided to go ahead, even though people as distinguished as Fermi at that time wondered whether a nuclear bomb would ignite the atmosphere
To nitpick, it's pretty well known that almost every physicist who worked on the Manhattan project encountered the "atmospheric ignition" problem. Apparently it was considered a good exercise for the newbies to prove that it was not possible given what was known about the nuclear cross-sections and energies of atmospheric atoms. For example, see "The making of the atomic bomb" by Richard Rhodes.
So the debate can be phrased better in terms of: what if there are unknown phenomena that could still lead to atmospheric ignition? This is not a trivial question. For example, the "Castle Bravo" nuclear test had a design yield of 6 megatons, but actually yielded 15 megatons due to an unforeseen fusion reaction involving lithium in the core. It ended up being the largest nuclear test ever performed by the United States, and ended up sickening and killing Japanese fishermen who accidentally saied through the fallout.
Another problem is that it's very hard to put a percentage on the risk of an event which is by nature unknown, or that by nature is either true or false. We now know that the atmosphere didn't ignite (and that micro-organisms didn't come back from the moon, etc.), so to say there is a 1% chance is somewhat meaningless. It's like saying there is a 1% chance that God exists.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
But when I peruse web sites of companies claiming to sell nanotech what I actually find are companies selling small amounts of powder that has been ground up really small. For example a medical application of nanotech is really small bits of ground up magnet with antibodies attached giving a nice way to detect antigens through a magnetic field. Or another application comes from the fact that really small particles have a high surface area to volume ratio making good reagents and catalysts for chemical processes. So nanotech is really just finely ground stuff. (It sounds a lot less sexy when you actually say the truth free of jargon.) And that, IMHO, is far more dangerous than imaginary robots because it can get in your lungs and lodge in other parts of your body. But this doesn't necessarily need specific regulation, we can just use existing regulation for particulate pollution more finely grained (no pun intended) to limit how much nanoparticle sized stuff may be released into the air.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
No, the grandparent is right. Buckministerfullerine is "just a special form of soot" in the same sense that cyanide "is just a special form of plant matter". Yes, there are low concentrations of the stuff in any fireplace. But if someone is suggesting wrapping drugs in buckyballs and injecting them as a delivery system, there's no way the FDA is going to accept, "Well, we don't regulate fireplaces, do we?" and give the treatment a go-ahead.
We don't have nearly enough data about most of the molecules being introduced into our lives. I don't see buckyballs as being particularly special in that regard. You seem to be saying that, because we've lived with "soot" for the last fifty thousand years, that is sufficient evidence of one of its components' harmlessness. It isn't, and it's better that we find out the facts before we base multi-billion dollar industries on it.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
My wife is a political science graduate student researching the Codex (and I'm going to spell this wrong) Alamantarius, which is a International Regulatory group based out of Rome dealing with food safty standards. I've been helping her edit/research her thesis a bit, so I'm in a pretty decent position to comment on this.
GM Foods - For starters, GM foods are more or less prevasive in the US right now. If you buy produce at a major supermarket, chances are 99% that it's a GM product. If it's marked "Organic" odds are that it's only partialy organic, more than likely also incorporating GM strains. Yes, that's not how it's supposed to be, but that's proving to be overwhelmingly the case.
GM foods carry a lot of risks, though not as many to the 1st world population as you've probably been lead to beleive. There is evidence that US Beef may contribute to various forms of cancer (the EU brought this evidence to light in their case before the WTO on their argiculture subsidies) but that's not a GM issue so much as it being pumped full of antibiotics and sterroids.
The real danger of GM foods is in the 3rd world (no longer an accecptable term, but a hell of a lot shorter than the real deal... and everyone knows what it means). Because GM foods are considered intelectual property, the seed stocks cost a great deal more than non-GM seed stocks. In many 3rd world countries, where 1st world corporations own a huge amount of the land, subsistance agriculture is no longer an option. In order to drive down food prices, 3rd world governments are forced to try to maximize production on non-agribuisness owned land. When offered GM crops that yeild 4-5x as much, they jump at the chance. Typicaly the first year's seed stock is free.
Unfortunatly, Thermodynamics comes into play here. You can't just create 5x as much food from the same plant without takinx 5x as much out of the soil. Doing so depletes the soil, making it all but useless for non-GM products. You can use high end fertilizers, but these very high nitrogen compounds often damage plants that have not been specificly tailored to survive them (read GM plants).
The trap is closed in year two. With feilds unable to sustain anything but GM products the faltering agricultural economy has no choice but to buy the seed stocks. Since they are IP, the stocks are priced well above those of normal seed stocks and are typicaly incapable of reproduction.
And you wonder where famine comes from.
In all honesty, the risks to you of eating a tomato grown with an extra tick skin to allow easier transport are fairly minimal... it just tases like crap. The real victims are the countries in which those tomatoes are grown to the exclusion of staple crops like corn and wheet so that you can have a Whopper meal (with tomato, lettuce, and pickles) for less than $5.00
Of course, there are a few stocks of GM corn that made it into the human food supply that were never approved for human use, just cattle. God alone knows what's in that stuff. That, by the way, does reproduce... and today we've no idea what corn is natural and what is cattle GM.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
That's where the stupidity in the proposed falls. Nanotech is a bunch of very disparate materials that have been lumped together 1) by people who don't understand them, and 2) researchers trying to make their work sound more interesting than it might actually be.
Nanotech is pretty much nothing and everything. This is just baseless fear of the unknown. We've been doing nanotech for years, it's called pharmaceuticals. Just like any other material, safety needs to be determined on a case-by-case basis.