Big worries over tiny particles
NANOTECHNOLOGY -- engineering substances down to billionths of a meter in size -- holds out such promise of providing super-strong materials or desalinating water inexpensively that no one wants to put a red light in its way. But there are enough safety questions to justify more yellow lights than either industry or government has yet deployed.
Locally, Cambridge is weighing a law to force companies making or using nanoparticles to report such activity , along with any known health risks. The problem is that much too little is known about those risks. The focus should be on getting industry and government to speed up research on the effects of nanoparticles, from their production all the way to their disposal as waste, before one of them turns into this generation's PCB or chlorofluorocarbon disaster. On Monday, the United Nations' Environment Program called for "swift action" by policymakers to evaluate nanotechnology and regulate it if necessary. Action throughout the industrialized world would help ensure that no single country's firms suffer because of its regulators' aggressive oversight.
Some new nano-applications are being subjected to regulatory scrutiny. The Food and Drug Administration, for instance, has looked at the safety of sun creams using nanoparticles of titanium dioxide. But there should also be more testing of the effect those particles have on the water they wash into.
Too often the users of nanoparticles assume that substances that are safe in larger dimensions will present no problems when used in nano applications. But if engineering a substance down to a few nanometers (a human hair is about 80,000 nanometers thick) gives it special features like improved electric conductivity, logic suggests it might also present new threats to the human body.
Two dollar amounts are often cited in the discussion on nanotechnology safety risks. One is the projected value globally of all applications of this technology by 2015: $1 trillion. The other is the estimated $200 billion in death benefits, medical care, cleanup costs, and legal fees associated with another miracle material, asbestos. If industry had invested more in investigating the health threat that asbestos fibers posed , thousands of lives and billions of dollars could have been saved.
For more than a year, the Environmental Protection Agency has been considering which course to take on nanotechnology. The agency could find guidance on its own web site, in a statement about the risk of fine particulate matter in industrial pollution: "The size of particles is directly linked to their potential for causing health problems," with very fine particles more likely to penetrate lung tissue. Both the federal government and industry should heed the United Nations' urging and increase investment in the potential downside of super-down sizing.
