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Facing the Dangers of Nanotech
bethr writes "Technology Review has a Q&A with Andrew Maynard, the science advisor for the Woodrow Wilson International Center's nanotechnology project regarding the dangers of nanomaterials and why we have to act now." From the article: "Individual experiments have indicated that if you develop materials with a nanostructure, they do behave differently in the body and in the environment. We know from animal studies that very, very fine particles, particles with high surface area, lead to a greater inflammatory response than the same amount of larger particles. We also know that they can enter the lining of the lungs and get through to the blood and enter other organs. There is some evidence that nanoparticles can move into the brain along the olfactory nerve, so this is completely circumventing the blood-brain barrier."
Arrrgh! help! they're in my brain!
... worthy to be afraid of.
Nanotech: The Asbestos of the Future.
As Mork would say, "Nano, Nano!"
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Since assembly-based nano isn't anywhere near yet, whenever news articles use the term 'nano', what they really mean is something more like 'chemical' or 'molecular'. TFA is no exception, really. So when he says 'There is some evidence that nanoparticles can move into the brain along the olfactory nerve, so this is completely circumventing the blood-brain barrier.' we can easily translate this as saying 'There is some evidence that molecules can move into the brain along the olfactory nerve, so this is completely circumventing the blood-brain barrier.' Yeah, some molecules can pass the blood-brain barrier. What's his point? It's all nano-FUD, IMO.
All that the producers of nanomaterials need to do is put a cartoon Camel on the box, and all the cool kids will be breathing nanonmaterials.
They're perfectly safe, and prevent acne.
Oh crap!
You mean you can see the Experimental threading indicators?
Thats bad - it means the nano threading weaved into the webpage has escaped and made its way into your optic nerve.
In reality I don't know and was wondering the same myself.
liqbase
Yes, and having one of those enter your brain along your olfactory nerve can cause serious health issues.
Lets see, they advocate the government looking over the shoulder and using Wikipedia to determine danger.
First, there is a problem with governmental idiots in charge of something they don't understand.
Two, I don't buy Wikipedia as an authoritative source. While it is source, it could be a start point, not an end point.
And of course this would not apply to marketing hyped products -- the nano-tech car wax and nano-tech hair shampoo; Right???
Fight Spammers!
I've been working with nanotech for years, and I haven't noticed any brain damage-amage-amage-amage-amage.
stuff |
It will happen, you know it.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
...than a packet of greased up Yoda Dolls on a Saturday night at Karl Rove's place when Jim Jeff comes over. Wootz!!!
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
If there are "dangers" associated with them, they will be PERFECT for the DoD to pickup on and investigate.
what would be better than a bomb that goes off and you breathe in particles that can easily penetrate your organs
Progress requires risk. Deal.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
For precisely the same reason that nano sized particles will be revolutionary to the world of pharmaceuticals, they may prove to be toxic in other applications.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Nature is replete with examples where scale matters. Insect-scale airfoils don't work particularly well. Jumbo jet-scale insects wouldn't fly, either. At the molecular level, flagella give great propulsion in fluids, but the same wouldn't hold at the macroscopic level.
The same is true in biology. I remember having read a study done at NASA on the effect of iron nanoparticles in lungs. (Alas, I can't seem to find the link anymore.) They concluded that at the nano scale, the iron particles could escape the normal protections and remain in the lungs (in the interstitium and cells themselves), where they could collect and have a toxic effect, including diminished lung function. (The test rats became lethargic, etc.) All this at exposure levels that wouldn't be considered toxic at other scales.
I've seen similar research on sunscreen. Zinc oxide particles are great protecting at UVA and UVB. However, at large scale, they're quite visible and hard to blend in. Make them smaller, and that problem goes away, but they get absorbed deeper into the skin. Make them smaller still, and it's quite possible that they'll be absorbed into the cells themselves, leading to new potential health effects. (e.g., does zinc oxide become carcinogenic when they remain in the cells for too long? Does the motion into the cells increase the likelihood of reactive oxygen species (free radicals) accumlating inside the cells, rather than outside?)
I'm not a biochemist or a biologist (I'm a biomathematician), so I don't have the answers to these questions. But it's clear that scale really does matter, and it needs to be considered. Is the danger overhyped? Possibly, or maybe not. That's why it needs to be studied. But it's going to be important to understand these effects when we move from the low levels that occur naturally to the high levels that will occur in human-made materials and products. -- Paul
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
I played a thought experiment with a very smart fellow. The goal of the experiment was to come up with a safe way to create self replicating nanites that could cure cancer. We had 1 nanite that would cure cancer, but it was, of course, slow. The goal was to create enough to heal an entire body.
.001% mutation that's still 100,000 self replicating mistakes. If even one of those 100,000 mistakes is a mutation that just doesn't turn off self replication you now have a very bad problem.
So the best way to make more nanites is to have the nanites make more of themselves. Seems pretty straight forward... only everytime we go about doing it we run into this little problem.
Mutations.
So we build these guys to start replicating and to stop replicating when we want them to... but when you make a billion of something you end up with some odd mutations. Even if you are talking about
Released, this nanite could theoretically convert the earth (see "grey goo") into a giant ball of itself.
Now I know this thread is going to be long, because so many of you very smart people will have so many smart ideas about how to make this safe. I'm glad you have these ideas and I'm glad you're voicing them. Some of them might even work.
What scares the hell out of me is that you're not the people working on this.
So essentially your argument is:
There exists some molecules that already enter the blood-brain barrier without problems. Therefor all molecules entering the blood-brain barrier have no problems. One could prove anything (including known falsehoods) using that kind of logic.
What I read in the article was that when we create very very fine particles out of substances they behave differently in biological organisms than they do when they aren't in very very small particles. We really have no information on how these very fine particles might behave in biological organisms, so we really should be more cautious in including them in food products, or anything else people might injest since they really haven't been tested yet.
AccountKiller
Released, this nanite could theoretically convert the earth (see "grey goo") into a giant ball of itself.
There's this little problem with replication called "energy", and the laws of thermodynamics. Making order out of disorder requires energy to be expended. Exactly where is all the energy going to come from to turn everything into "grey goo"?
AccountKiller
Noone should read Michael Crichton and base scientific policy on it, most importantly because what he writes is fiction. It may a good thing for provoking some thoughts, but nothing else. Scientists taking advice from him? I would think we would know better than that to propose such thing especially after his State of Fear (the book where he portrays global warming/climate change as fud making terrorists).
I wouldn't take even Asimov novells as anything to be read if I would want to do science in a particular field. Fiction!=Science, no matter how good fiction it is.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Personally, I'm a good deal more worried about being eaten by DINOSAURS!
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
This is very erie... Anyone read Prey by Michael Crichton?
Yeah, it was replete with pseudoscience that would make a great movie, but terrible research. Nanobots that are as intelligent, sophisticated, and above all mobile as the ones in that story aren't just impossible under current technology limits, they're impossible at all.
Sixty years ago, tech enthusiasts were absolutely certain we'd have a colony base on the Moon by now. Sixty years from now, nanotech will be just as stunted compared to where we imagine we'll be.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I remember the 1950s, sounds like the atomic bomb again, radiation poising, evil mad science, nature-gone-wild ... sounds like more B-grade scifi movies are on their way, or the new-conservative plutocrats are justified in keep everyone from behaving responsibly by not having a gun, stem-cell, nuke .... NanNO Borg the monster was a human infected by terrorist spread necrotic-nano-bots from Mars.
...) who are continually gucken up the world for humanity.
If we are going to destroy our species, I wish would just get it done. Anything is better than accepting domination by fear-mongering idiots in charge (Neo-Nazi, Neoconservative, Neo/Pseudo-Christian/Moslem/Jew
Give me liberty, or give me death, from the all KnowWhatsBestForYou powerful of this world.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
...doth not an article make. Won't someone PLEASE think of the *science* ?!
Caveat Utilitor
Is the danger overhyped? Possibly, or maybe not. That's why it needs to be studied.
I'm old enough to remember something very similar to this back when gene splicing first became practical. Recombinant technology had a lot of hype around its promise, while at the same time there was an equal amount of hype about its dangers. Depending on which "expert" you were listening to, it was either going to solve all our problems or wipe humanity off the planet.
The compromise was to put stringent safeguards on it. Twenty years later, we can look back and see that a lot of them were unnecessary, and that much of the hype was overblown on both sides. I think we're going to see something similar arising from nanotechnology. Yes, there's a lot of promise, and yes, there are some dangers. Until we better understand the technology, it's better to put in some safeguards, with the idea in mind that we can always relax them or tighten them.
It's always instructive to look back, and to take some lessons from the past. Banning a technology outright because of fear doesn't work. Someone will eventually use it. At the same time, embracing a technology unreservedly also doesn't work. There are many examples of it blowing up in someone's face after-the-fact. It's not anti-technology to be aware of potential dangers and to take steps to mitigate them as you move forward. But neither should the dangers prevent you from moving forward.
I'm old enough to remember something very similar to this back when gene splicing first became practical. Recombinant technology had a lot of hype around its promise, while at the same time there was an equal amount of hype about its dangers.
/. today on carbon nanotubes in ancient steel, and of course the first discovery of exotic carbon allotropes was in smoke, which is not exactly a rare substance. This suggests that some forms of nanoparticles have been around in the environment for a long time. However, it does not follow from this that naturally occuring nanoparticles are similar to the ones we are trying to create. Some, like carbon nanotubes and buckyballs, are unlikely to cause harm. But given their ability to infiltrate the body's natural defenses there needs at least to be careful assessment of new nanosubstances before any are allowed to released into the environment.
There was actually a voluntary suspension of recombinant DNA research for a short time back in the '70's. Everyone started doing it again when the truth became clear: recombination happens in nature all the time, and the mechanism was such that naturally occuring recombination was doing all the things that scientists wanted to do. Given this, it was felt there was little risk of uncontrolled side-effects. It is worth adding that this is different from believing that there is little risk (social, economic or environmental) from GMOs specifically designed to cause harm to others for the profit of some, like those containing Monsanto's Terminator gene.
The situation with nanoparticles is a little more ambiguous. There was as story on
Nano-materials are nothing more than large molecules, after all, and you wouldn't want people releasing large amounts of potentially deadly substances into the environment in the fond hope that they won't harm anyone with sufficient money to sue.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
And that's exactly the point - slow down cowboy until you have some idea of what you're doing. The recombinant DNA restrictions worked exactly as designed - people slowed down a bit and studied potential downsides, worked on mitigation strategies (P level confinement - now widely used on our War on Terrorism(R)(TM)(Patent Pending by Johnson's wax)).
Hopefully real nanotechnology will turn out to be more than marketing and venture capital hype, but it behooves us to look at potential pitfalls as well as potential progress. Besides, you should be able to get some pretty good anti terrorism funding by doing that kind of research these days.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
a bomb that goes off and small (but not nano) pieces of jagged metal (let's call them 'shrapnel') get shot through your body at very high speed. pretty revolutionary, eh?
...
...
Back in the eighties, a friend of mine quit a job (programmer) with a defense contractor, when he found out:
(A) The firm was making cluster bombs
(B) from dark-red plastic, because
(C) plastic isn't revealed by x-rays, and red is hard for surgeons to see during surgery.
The point was not to kill large numbers of people, but to injure large numbers of people in such a manner as to require lots of expensive medical personnel, thus winning the war by attrition.
Immoral? That's a judgement call.
Cost-effective? The defense contractor thought so.
-kgj
-kgj
as a student in a nanotech degree, I have to laugh at the conjectures here. all of these comments about "grey goo" and self replicating "nanites" are pure alarmism. Drexler himself doesn't believe it's possible. and as for all of this screaming about the control of nanomaterials, powder technologies are only a very small part of the whole nanotech research area. most of the research that I've come in to contact with has been focused not on powders but on surfaces and coatings, or biomedical sources, which is where all the money is and Prey is horribly bad. the situation described, as well as many of the properties attributed to nanomachines, is complete fiction. problem is, it's believeable to non-scientists. when talking about nanotechnolgy to non-scientists, I either get "what is that" or "you'll kill us all, grey goo." it's actually a damaging book, in that it actively attempts to hobble a science before it was anywhere near that level of complexity.
Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your home!
It's been known to cause mild death in most cases as well.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."