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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?
Most thought that radiation was harmless or even a cureall after it was first discovered. Dismiss the concern at your own risk.
wouldn't we have evolved defences?
also, and related, the following, by John C. Monica, 2007.
The distinction between "engineered," "incidental," and "natural" nanoparticles is beginning to blur. A vocal contingent advocates regulation of the first category without much focus on the later two. We recently asked whether this distinction is meaningful for certain EHS purposes. The human body may not differentiate between exposure to the three categories of materials. On the other hand, it makes sense to be concerned with reducing man-made risks first.
Here is a related question: What happens to this definitional scheme when naturally occurring nanomaterials (ex/ carbon nanotubes and fibers) are harvested/mined and then used for commercial purposes? While they are not "man-made" in the traditional sense, they presumably pose the same exposure risks as engineered nanomaterials created in a lab. The industry is currently exploring cheaper ways to mass-produce nanomaterials. Consequently, we will undoubtedly see more "natural" nanomaterials being used in commercial applications. This issue merits serious consideration in any attempt to regulate nanotechnology and/or create uniform standards and nomenclature.
"Engineered" = purposefully created; man-made. "Incidental" = unintentionally created; by-product of human activity. "Natural" = found in nature; volcanic rock; smoke.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
You are presently two extremes as if they were the only options.
EITHER "plow ahead" OR "move as slowly as possible". This is a false set of choices. When you're walking down the street are your only choices to either run as fast as you can or move as slowly as possible?
To say that greater oversight makes sense is very different from "as slowly as possible". At this point we know that GM crops are interbreeding with non-GM crops. At the very least this is being used as yet another front in the We-own-your-life-through-controlling-your-IP war. Farmers who not only didn't want GM crops but actively tried to avoid them are being sued because seeds have blown across the plains and corporations are demanding payment for the resulting plants. Does this seem like grounds for investigation to you? It sure does to me.
There are dozens of these issues, if not many more. And, on top of everything else, after a quarter century of Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush, our regulators themselves are long overdue for more transparency. After all, Tyson Chicken was one of Bill Clinton's biggest campaign supporters and if you think that didn't affect the way his people dealt with this kind of thing then you haven't been paying attention. Not to mention the waves of junk science that the EPA and other government agencies have been subjected to from their own politically-appointed bosses since Dubya took office.
Should we huddle in a corner and live on raw twigs? No. Should we let anybody do anything anywhere anytime? Also no. But there is a middle ground and that is where we should be.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
try
A Review of Carbon Nanotube Toxicity and Assessment of Potential Occupational and Environmental Health Risks
Lam, Chiu-wing; James, John; McCluskey, Richard; Arepalli, Sivaram; Hunter, Robert
Critical Reviews in Toxicology, Volume 36, Number 3, May-June 2006 , pp. 189-217(29)
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
The good old times of duck and cover
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women.
To quote from TFA:
Typical of the research was a report earlier this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that found when nano-sized particles were given with chemotherapy, doses of the anticancer drug could be cut by about 95 per cent, without any reduction in therapeutic effect.
But the new report recommended that, given that the impact of nanomaterials on living things is "poorly understood,"...
I don't know about you but if my biochemistry teacher hammered anything into us it was two interrelated concepts:
- Just about everything in the human body runs off fewer than twenty mechanisms and these same mechanisms are used over and over to do many different things.
- All of these mechanisms are interconnected. You change how one is working and you'll affect at least two or three.
Let me add a third: when you massively change the strength of a reagent, you change what it does. Dilute hydrogen peroxide is a useful and safe antiseptic. Increase the concentration twenty times and you have a rocket fuel that melts your flesh.
If any approach makes some approach twenty times as powerful then it is doing other things, too. Count on it. We've seen this over and over, from birth control pills to heart medication.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Well, lets start with some plausible hypotheses as to how the materials might be unsafe, and then study those.
Granted, there will be lots of media hysteria like there was in the case of the supposed cell phone/brain cancer link years ago, but that's inevitable. Since it's inevitable, we might as well proceed in the most epistemologically sound way. That would be to do our best to show that these materials are unsafe, then (hopefully) fail in each specific mechanism we can think of.
Logically, you might claim that we're assuming that the materials are unsafe, but that's only as a null hypothesis regarding specific mechanisms. That's not the same as assuming the materials might be unsafe in some way which is beyond the capacity of human ingenuity to anticipate. That would not only bar trying anything new, it would also bar continuing anything we're already doing. For that matter, it also bars stopping anything we're already doing.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"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... 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 16-member panel that wrote the new report included some of Canada's leading scientists and top international experts on nanomaterials."
Ok, that's a lot of ifs and maybes. How about you do the testing before adamantly stating that "Nanomaterials More Dangerous Than We Think." And how about more than 16 people, not all of which are scientists and experts on nanomaterials, actually chime in on this.
Contains small parts. Keep away from children.
Things like nanotubes, buckyballs and nanosilver particles DON'T EXIST IN NATURE. How do you think nature (even our own cells) will react to them?
I read another article in physorg concerning nanosilver, and how it has the potential to kill soil bacteria, which are a fundamental part of the ecosystem.
It's not the atoms you moron - it's how they're artificially combined and exposed to the environment.
Want a more common example: chromium picolinate, which is sold as the perfect solution for losing weight. The truth is, in tests done with fruit flies, it generates chromosomal aberrations, impedes progeny development,[13] and causes sterility and lethal mutations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_picolinate#Health_claims_and_debates). And it's already being sold commercially!
I don't have a problem with nanomaterials being manufactured for, say, microprocessors. But adding nanoparticles to common household items like refrigerators, stoves, and even the socks you wear, that's going too far.
Just look where the industry and big corporations have situated us. Without proper safety research in antibiotics, we now have to cope with drug-resistant "superbacteria". Well, these bacteria didn't exist 50 years ago! And yet antibacterial soap, shampoos and whatnot are STILL being sold in mass quantities.
Mankind is destroying the planet because of greedy idiots who only see money. Anyone who says "where are the safety studies?" is called a fearmonger who opposes progress.
Health risks are going to be identical no matter how you categorize a material.
Consider asbestos. Asbestos particles are certainly very similar in many respects to some of the engineered nanomaterials. If I manufacture artificial asbestos, it will have the same toxology as 'natural' asbestos.
The meaningful question in my mind is 'Is there a significant source of natural exposure to material X?' If so then we would be reasonably justified in making the assumption that similar exposure to the same material from man made sources will have similar effects, and we also have grounds for making a default assumption that the human body can tolerate the material to a certain extent.
However it seems to me that there are or will be a large class of nanomaterials which are substantially different from anything found in nature. It would seem prudent to study the toxicity of such materials carefully before they see wide use.
Personally I don't see a close correspondence between GMOs and nanomaterials. GMOs incorporate genetic elements which are already found naturally in a variety of organisms. Furthermore even if we designed some 'artificial genes' the proteins expressed via those genes are not going to be radically different from those found in existing organisms. Obviously such a protein would need to be tested for toxicity, but it would be no more likely to be hazardous than one isolated from a natural source.
To my mind the majority of the fears the public has about GMOs are largely unfounded. There are various issues, but it is far more tenable to believe GMOs are largely benign than it would be to believe that nanomaterials are. Thus a stance of 'GMOs are safe unless proven otherwise' is not unreasonable, but a similar stance with regard to nanomaterials probably is not.
So my opinion would be that engineered nanomaterials should be studied for biological effects before widespread commercial deployment. That might not be necessary for certain limited engineering uses, but we SHOULD be reasonably cautious. If you want to sell me a consumer good which contains engineered nanomaterials, they should require review and approval in some fashion similar to the rules in place for potentially toxic chemicals. And those rules themselves probably require beefing up.
The other issue that has never been addressed with any types of materials is synergistic effects. Any given material might be safe in and of itself, but in the real world we get exposed to a 'soup' of compounds and materials every day. Seems to me the major thing we should all be worried about is just how thick does that broth get before we're done in by the entirely unknown and unforeseen interactions between them?
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Radiation is extremly safe and it does cure many disease that have no alternative treatment. We are bathed in radiation at every second of every day with no ill effects but just like oxygen and water, in excess it will kill you very quickly. Just because it COULD kill you doesn't mean it is dangerous.
If you RTFA you will find that they say nano could enter cells, could cause cancer, could disrupt cellular processes OR it could be perfectly harmless (as harmless as dirt) BUT there isn't enough information to tell.
Personally I think the largest concern with nano is carbon nanotubes because they have the potential to cause the same problems as asbestos. But what is important is to do your due diligence and TEST anthing you want to sell.
There is no reason to fear nano, only to be a little cautious.
Using radiation
Well, lets start with some plausible hypotheses as to how the materials might be unsafe, and then study those.
There are two things that make nano-[anything] problematic
1. Our bodies are not designed to filter nano-sized particles
2. nano-[anything] has vastly more surface area, which makes it much more reactive (ie possibly toxic) at lower concentrations.
These are not hypotheses, they are facts. All that's left to study is which elements are toxic in nano-form and which aren't. And I'm personally much more comfortable with a default assumption of "unsafe" than the opposite.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
Show me some research.
Would you understand it?
I spent a bit of time studying Nanotech at uni while reading Physics. I am hopelessly out of date now and I would probably barely understand it, especially as this involves the intersection of Physics with Biology.
I am fairly astounded you can be as arrogant as to dismiss on going research by various universities as "pointless worrying" just because they have not finished it yet. Research is often fairly talked about in academic circles long before it is published.
This also reminds me of asbestos. It was known to be potentially harmful for a great many years in academic circles long before it was proved to be harmful. Since I know of people who died of asbestosis I have a little more time for this sort of research being discussed long before a link has been thoroughly proven beyond all scientific doubt.
I can quite easily see how another extremely fine particle similar to asbestos fibre that has never existed naturally in any quantity could have the potential for serious harm if inhaled, swallowed or placed in contact with the skin. The scale of nanotech particles means they could quite easily become airborne if not handled carefully.
I dont read
#1 Not true! The actual environment that our cells operate on IS nano. Every crucial function in the body demands exceptionally tight control of structures much SMALLER than most nano-sized particles are likley to be
#2 Completly true...which is a good thing. We are essentially bags of salty water with a lot of gunk like lipids and proteins lying around and a huge amount of free energy in constant use. We are potentially the most hostile environment a nano-particle is likley to encounter. The huge surface area means it is much more likley to get gummed up and inactivated almost immediatly causing no more harm than any other chemical you ingest.
These are not hypothesis, they are facts. I am not suggesting there will be no harm but I am suggesting that there is no reason to think that nano-particles as a class will be more toxic than other classes of chmicals.
#1 Not true! The actual environment that our cells operate on IS nano. Every crucial function in the body demands exceptionally tight control of structures much SMALLER than most nano-sized particles are likley to be
Maybe we're talking about different things.
When I say that our bodies are not designed to filter nano-[anything] I meant the respiratory system and the circulatory system. Yes "The actual environment that our cells operate on IS nano" but most of the stuff floating around our bodies is micro-sized, not nano-sized and the body's defense system is setup to defend on that scale.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
1. Our bodies are not designed to filter nano-sized particles
Our bodies already seek and destroy viruses.