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Nanomaterials More Dangerous Than We Think
bshell writes "A Canadian panel of leading scientists warns that nanomaterials appearing in a rapidly growing number of products might potentially be able to enter cells and interfere with biological processes. According to a story in the Globe and Mail, the Council of Canadian Academies concluded that 'there are inadequate data to inform quantitative risk assessments on current and emerging nanomaterials... Their small size, the report says, may allow them "to usurp traditional biological protective mechanisms" and, as a result, possibly have "enhanced toxicological effects."' The council is an independent academic advisory group funded by the federal government, but operating at arms-length from Ottawa. The 16-member panel that wrote the new report included some of Canada's leading scientists and top international experts on nanomaterials."
In the US, we all count on GM agriculture to provide us with cheap and plentiful fruits and vegetables as well as provide feed grain for our chemically-enhanced cows and chickens. Genetic manipulation provides us with our way of life and for the most part we are happily accepting of it.
In other parts of the world, this type of "frankenscience" makes people uncomfortable. There is a strong pushback against GM crops because for all the benefits of them, the drawbacks are as yet unknown.
Should we plow ahead with these new technologies, or should we move as slowly as possible to delay unwanted contamination? We can create test groups and phased deployments of these new products, but there is no good plan for widespread deployment that takes into account both the safety of the product users as well as exposing them to potential dangers against their will. Either we sell technologically-improved products, or we don't.
Which is the right mindset?
It's easy to hypothesize how nanomaterials can be unsafe. All of biology works off of very tiny objects of specific shapes. These shapes allow different things to happen depending on how they fit each other, and where they fit, sort of like keys in locks. When making things of very small size we have to be careful about the shapes of these things, because we don't know what keyhole in a cell somewhere it might accidentally fit into, triggering some change in the cell that we don't know about due to not enough research.
1. Our bodies are not designed to filter nano-sized particles
Our bodies already seek and destroy viruses.