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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); }
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.
Yes, and having one of those enter your brain along your olfactory nerve can cause serious health issues.
OMG! The three-quarteres of the Earth is covered in very deep bodies of liquid nanoparticles! Even worse, the atmosphere now consists almost entirely of nanoparticles! We inhale huge amounts of them with every breath!
WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
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
I was originally going to write a post to show that you might not be totally justified in what you're writing, but then I realised that nano is the SI prefix for 10^-9, while a hydrogen molecule is 1.06 * 10^-10m, so you might not be completely off in saying that this is nothing new, so this is one score to you.
However, I have to mention that the size might not be the problem, but rather the properties of these nanoparticles.
The most important thing to remember when talking about nanoparticles, is that a lot of these materials have a unique thing in common, quoth wikipedia, "vastly increased ratio of surface area to volume". Remember for example lunar dust and the problems associated with it? Imagine that effect on a much worse level.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
No, this is not FUD. Forget gasses and liquids, this is about solids. Solids come in non-molecular chunks. Out bodies (and the bodies of every other living thing out there) are accustomed to encountering solids that are in fairly large sized chunks. If you can find a way to process those solids into much smaller chunks then you have a nano-material. This is the stuff that's dangerous. It's true of non-nano tech too. For example if I had a large piece of asbestos, that's not really dangerous, but if I pulverize it into dust it is. These new nano materials open up the possibility that alot more materials could be dangerous.
....it'll pass. What if I swallowed something that contained a quarter shredded into pieces no larger than 100nm, will that pass? Or will large amounts get trapped in various nooks and corners in my guts, and what effect will it have if those bits stay there for 30 years? What if I breathe it into my lungs? Will it do something like asbestos dust?
A TIONS.htm for cosmetics and foot powder containing Iron Oxide and Zinc Oxide nano materials that you can easily ingest or breathe.
If I swallow a quarter,
See http://www.kemcointernational.com/NANOPHASEAPPLIC
> We're all gonna die!
Correct.
I find your post rather callous. While you may be right that breakthroughs don't happen without associated risks and the occasional negative or outright dangerous result, I believe we've been extremely careless during the 20th century. Your Xray example is a good one. Physicists and biologists knew fairly early on Xray radiation was ionizing, but for quite some time it didn't occur to anyone to not expose themselves or others to high doses. How hard would it be to remain a bit cautious? And maybe save a few lives and make countless other better in the process.
TFA simply advocates caution and diligent research into negative consequences of nanotech while the technology is being developed. TFA never urges abandoning anything. I agree with the author that we should keep close tabs on this stuff and watch it for long term effects.
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.