This article was taken from the September issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
Nanotechnology has a bad rep. But is it a potential killer in our midst, or a victim of outdated regulation and scare stories?
Imagine if your company developed a fuel additive that could be mixed into regular diesel to change the way it burned, increasing the efficiency of an engine by more than ten percent. Imagine that it also cleaned the engine and scrubbed the exhaust of carbon dioxide and soot. Imagine that these results could be achieved by adding just a few parts per million of this substance to a tank of fuel. You would expect companies in the US -- the world’s largest oil-consuming country -- to be beating a path to your door, wouldn’t you?
Professor Peter Dobson certainly thought so. The Oxfordshire Company he founded developed Environ, a cerium oxide-based fuel additive that does exactly that. The catalyst underwent successful trials in 2003 by a Hong Kong bus company before coming to the attention of transportation giant, Stagecoach, which implemented it across its 7,000-strong fleet of buses in the UK. Soon Envirox was in use in several countries, most recently debuting in Canada (in Stagecoach’s Coach Canada buses) in December 2009.
When it arrived in the US in 2005, however, Dobson’s mileage-boosting engine-cleaning fuel additive stalled. Despite Envirox being given a clean bill of health for the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) standard fuel-additives tests, the EPA then chose to invoke a further, non-standard set of tests. His company, Oxonica, simply could not afford this “open-ended” safety testing demanded by the EPA, an expenditure that Dobson says “only a major oil company could undertake”. He’s yet to see a single drop of his catalyst being used in vehicles on US highways, and doesn’t expect to any time soon. Welcome to the uncertain business of nanotechnology.
The concept of nanotechnology was first postulated by physicist Richard Feynman in 1959, at a lecture at the California Institute of Technology. In it he described how one set of miniature tools could be used to build a smaller set, continuing the process downwards to individual atoms and molecules. The term “nanotechnology” didn’t arrive until 1974, when it was coined by Professor Norio Taniguchi of the Science University of Tokyo.
The most workable definition describes a nanomaterial as having at least one dimension that measures between one and 100 billionths of a metre across, and exhibits novel properties because of this tiny size. A nanoparticle (such as a speck of soot) would be considered “3D”. But the definition also covers “2D” nano materials such as surface coatings that are a few molecules thick, but might spread out to cover large areas, and “1D” nano wires that are nano scale in diameter but can reach lengths 1,000 times this size.
Over the last two decades, nanotechnology has been embraced by the scientific, military, aerospace, chemical, manufacturing and pharmaceutical industries, and exploited for its advantages in food production, automobiles, clothing, building materials, packaging, electronics, cosmetics, paints, medicine and more. The US National Science Foundation estimated in 2000 that the nanotech market would be worth over $1tn by 2015, a figure later increased to $1.5tn by Cientifica, a Madrid-based tech consultancy with links to the European Space Agency. According to the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology “Report into Nanotechnology and Food” (published in January 2010), the market is currently worth around $30bn per year.
Yet the technology’s commercial growth has been accompanied by fears that it could damage human health and the environment. This in turn is stoking pressure on government and regulators to limit -- even ban -- a technology whose promise includes cleaner fuels, improved water filtration, better medicines, faster electronics and healthier foods.
As Wired listens to Dobson, his frustration is clear. Unlike similar rare-earth elements, cerium oxide has no known adverse health effects, and has been incorporated into the fabric of self-cleaning ovens and catalytic converters. But the prospect of exhaust fumes carrying free particles of nano-sized cerium oxide into the environment does not sit well with the EPA. Dobson believes this is down to an irrational suspicion of all chemical products holding a nano prefix. “How many car-tyre manufacturers investigate whether tyre dust is safe?” he posits.
Dobson isn’t trying to suggest that this obviates the risk of either being dangerous. He does, however, believe that the industry is being asked to provide levels-risk data that goes beyond that demanded from other manufacturers, to the point that it is hobbling innovation. This is partly the result of successful campaigning by some environmental groups against the fledgling industry. Dobson identifies the burden of evidence that companies working in novel technologies are expected to shoulder, saying: “It’s easy to knock nano with statements which merely capture headlines.”
He complains that, although safety data is expensive and time-consuming to gather, accusations of potential ill effects are free.
He would instead prefer that regulators engage critics and adopt an evidence based approach: “These people are holding us back and harming efforts to understand any adverse effects that nano particles might have. I believe there is a responsibility on the part of these people to get in there and have constructive dialogue with innovators.”
Hilary Sutcliffe, director of Matter, a UK think-tank specialising in new technologies, has a different view. “On the whole NGOs have been responsible in their engagement so far. There are clearly uncertainties which need to be resolved and NGOs call for clarity about such risks,” she tells Wired. “However, if they are to remain credible with those who have access to information from a number of sources (such as our pilot website nanoandme.org), NGOs need to engage with real evidence and not cherry-pick data which may ultimately be misleading.”
Professor Andrew Maynard issued a similar challenge on his blog, 2020science.org, to environmental group Friends of the Earth. Currently director of the Risk Science Centre at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, Maynard has been active in nanotechnology science and policy for over 15 years. Responding to claims by Friends of the Earth that nanoparticles in sunscreen were harmful to humans, he asked: “What is your worst-case estimate of the risks from titanium dioxide and/or zinc oxide nanoparticles in sunscreens?” By focusing on this kind of tangible risk, he hopes to move the debate beyond fear-mongering. “What I am interested in is a number,” he wrote. “A probability of a specific impact caused by using nano sunscreen over a period of time.”
Within the UK and Europe, there is no single body tasked with regulating nanomaterials. This doesn’t mean that the industry is unregulated; rather it is implicitly covered by a complex array of existing regulatory systems. The laws that govern the safe use of chemicals also cover nanotechnology.
However, the concern is that these laws are ill-suited to deal with its unusual properties. Chemicals imported to and manufactured in Europe are subject to the remits of legislation known as Reach: the regulation on Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and restriction of Chemical substances. Operating on a “no data, no market” premise, Reach requires essential information (such as physiochemical properties and toxicological effects) on substances to be disclosed. However, Reach does not differentiate between a bulk chemical and its nano-sized form, which in theory would allow a nanomaterial to be distributed under safety information that bears little relation to the material’s known properties and toxicology.
The Reach statutes only apply to chemicals that are produced or imported above a threshold of one tonne. Producing a full chemical safety assessment is only required after crossing the ten-tonne threshold. By its nature, nanotechnology rarely leads to orders of this size. Legislators are currently working on ways to amend Reach to incorporate nanotech, but have stopped short of blocking products while they do so.
At its core, this is a debate about risk. Without reliable data, governments cannot take an informed view of a technology’s consumer-health risks. Britain’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP) commented in 2008: “We are conscious of the extent to which knowledge lags significantly behind the pace of innovation.” The government’s UK Nanotechnologies Strategy, published in March this year, emphasises the need for stringent safety regulations and a more considered pace in developing new products and materials. Maynard commented on the UK strategy: “I advocate dealing with the potential adverse impacts of nanotechnologies. But developing a national strategy that is two-thirds focused on addressing potential risks seems a little over the top.” Echoing sentiments expressed by Dobson, Maynard identified a gap between this industry’s desire to prove safety and the development of a standardised framework to do just that. No one is in favour of a system where the first indications of a nanomaterial’s toxicity are discovered in the environment or among humans, but equally no one is sure what the alternative is.
Foods provide a model for how nanomaterials pass into the human body. Nanoparticles that are insoluble can pass through barriers such as the gut wall, and have a tendency to accumulate in tissues. An example is colloidal silver, a suspension of silver nanoparticles popularised in the 90s by exponents of alternative medicine as a “natural” antibiotic. If consumed excessively it builds up, and has been known to cause fits, organ damage and permanent blue-grey discolouration of the skin.
A report released last year by the UK’s Institute of Occupational Medicine warned: “Little is known in relation to consumer exposure, and work in nanoparticles and food seems to be missing.” The Department of Health has committed £1.1m to researching the health impact of nanomaterials including carbon nanotubes (rolled-up sheets of carbon hexagons, each 10,000 times thinner than a human hair, discovered by IBM in 1991) and inhaled nanoparticles (under particular scrutiny due to the physical resemblance between high aspect nanoparticles -- those whose width or depth are considerably less than their length -- and asbestos fibres). The first results are not expected until 2012.
In March 2010, the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee published the results of its year-long investigation into the use of nanotech by the food industry. Innovations in this field include plastic bottles of Corona coated with clay nanoparticles that act as a gas barrier, prolonging shelf life, and silica nanoparticles added to improve the taste of foods. However, the panel, led by the previous chair of the British Food Standards Agency, Professor Lord Krebs, criticised the food industry for maintaining a veil of secrecy over its use of such nanotechnology.
The British public have long distrusted innovations in food production. The introduction of mandatory milk pasteurisation in the UK, to stem some 2,500 deaths annually from bovine tuberculosis, was fiercely opposed during the 30s and 40s. Such attitudes -- more recently manifest in hostility to genetic modification -- may explain the reluctance of food and- drink manufacturers to stoke public debate. However, Krebs argues that this strategy has a huge potential to backfire: “We believe that they should adopt exactly the opposite approach. If you want to build confidence you should be open rather than secretive.”
Greater transparency may also offer a better strategy for developing a regulatory system in the absence of any solid data on the risks that nanomaterials pose. In late 2008, the RCEP voiced its support for such a system in a well-received report titled “Novel Materials in the Environment”. The panel brought together scientists, lawyers, policy-makers and industry specialists to tackle the problem of regulating technologies that held what Donald Rumsfeld might call “unknown unknowns”. Nanotechnologies were singled out not simply because of their novelty, but because of the huge range of potential applications and consumer products they promised to find use in.
The panel of experts concluded that, in the absence of known dangers, there is a need to be vigilant for unknown ones. And the best way of doing this is to keep a close eye on where exactly nanomaterials are being used. In the event that a nanomaterial is discovered to be harmful, a public database of all nanomaterials and their usage would easily allow authorities to investigate where the material in question had been used. They could then act quickly to limit the production and release of such nanomaterial into the environment, and identify individuals likely to have been exposed.
However, attempts to build such a register have met with little success. A voluntary register of materials established by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) received just 13 submissions between September 2006 and September 2008. Hilary Sutcliffe believes the nanotech industry needs to be more engaged. “Companies are going to have to bite the bullet and be much more open about their use of this technology. We hear so much about ‘learning the lessons of GM’ and see so little evidence of it actually happening,” she says. “The public needs to see a clear benefit to society, to know that appropriate health, safety or environmental testing has been done. These are not unreasonable expectations, but we need innovative ways of making that happen which might take quite a few of us right out of our comfort zones into new ways of working and communicating.”
Despite the recommendations of the RCEP, it’s unlikely that regulators will move to make such a register compulsory. To begin with, nanotechnology is notoriously difficult to define. Although the working definition centres on a straightforward metric size in the range of one to 100nm, the reality is that particles exhibit nano properties over a wide range of sizes that can vary from one chemical to the next. This presents such a challenge that there is still no universally accepted regulatory definition of what constitutes a nanomaterial, and so it would remain unclear which products should be included. The production of ice cream and ricotta cheese both involve manipulating food on the nanoscale, but it’s unlikely the Soil Association intended to ban these from the dinner table when it called for a moratorium on nano-derived foods in 2008.
To complicate matters, some nanoparticles are “doped” by applying other chemicals to their surface, so the same particle is engineered to behave in a different way. Another problem is one of enforcement. Detection of nanoparticles is still in its infancy -- any test has to distinguish between manmade nanomaterials and naturally occurring particles such as soot. Plus, these are nascent industries with the potential to boost the UK economy. The government is unlikely to put into place any onerous regulation that might cause nanotechnology firms to take flight abroad.
Rob Aitken believes these fears shouldn’t preclude us from developing new nanomaterials. As strategic director of the Institute of Occupational Medicine in Edinburgh, he has worked with industry and government to provide advice on toxicology studies and nanotechnology research. He tells Wired: “Many of the nanomaterials that come on to the market will have very few problems associated with them, but some will. Part of the difficulty is knowing which is which at the moment.” But he also points out that we have been using nanotechnology for a long time. The carbon black used in the ink to print this article is an example of a nanomaterial that has been around for 40 years without presenting any significant health threat.“ There is a lot of research going on, but the problem is that it has not been well co-ordinated at a national or international level,” Aitken says.
To manufacturers and consumers, the rise of nanotechnology is an exciting and dramatic innovation with huge potential. The possible risks linger at the end of the table, intangible and indistinct -- the ghost at the feast -- a guest that no one is sure how to accommodate.
Frank Swain is a Liverpool-based writer and public speaker specialising in science