Government Urged To Examine Nanotech's Risks

WASHINGTON — The government urgently needs to come up with a clear strategy for understanding the environmental and health dangers of the emerging nanotechnology industry, according to exasperated members of Congress, public interest groups and even some nanotech companies.

Although nanotech products soon will account for $1 trillion in annual revenue, some accuse key federal agencies of "sauntering along" with little concern about the risks involved for workers, consumers and the environment.

The invention of tools like the scanning tunneling electron microscope, which can move individual atoms around with great precision, has led to the explosion of nanotechnology in the past two decades. Some economists predict the field will bring on the "next industrial revolution."

Hundreds of consumer products, including toothpaste, fabrics and sunscreen, contain vanishingly small nano-engineered particles and hundreds of others are manufactured using nanotechnology, according to researchers at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Materials such as fullerenes, the ball-shaped 60-atom carbon molecules engineered by scientists at Rice University only 32 years ago, have become foundation chemicals for large industries, said David Rejeski, director of the center's Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies. Carbon "nanotubes," developed from fullerenes, support other industries.

Products using gold, silver, silica and other materials manipulated in such tiny units that they refuse to obey established laws of chemistry are also exploding in the market, he said.

"We're talking about substances that didn't even exist a few years ago," he said, "and there is no real strategy in the government for regulating them or even understanding the health and safety risks they may bring with them."

"Time is not on our side," Andrew Maynard, the center's chief scientist, said in testimony last year to the House Science and Technology Committee. "We're having a flood of nano-based materials on the market, and I'm not aware of any product which has any warnings or any identification of what any of the potential risks might be."

At that hearing, committee members scolded officials from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the Energy Department and the National Science Foundation for what committee chairman Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., called failing "to get a handle on this issue."

Boehlert said the government was funding nanotechnology research in a scattershot manner, with no overall strategy for understanding the risks.

The chairman was told that the overall strategy came from budget approvals by the White House Office of Management and Budget, which under President Bush has become known for its stubborn opposition to government regulation.

OMB Director Rob Portman "doesn't know diddly about nano research," Boehlert snorted.

Although the National Nanotech Initiative, a multiagency consortium created by former President Clinton in 2001, claims that the government is spending over $38 million a year in "highly relevant" risk research, Rejeski said Wilson Center researchers can locate only $11 million.

He said the government should be spending at least $50 million per year on risk research, and that many agencies such as the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health have received no appropriations for such work.

Matthew Nordan, president of Lux Research, said many manufacturers would be happier if the government would come up with a clear strategy for exploring and regulating nanotechnology risk.

In fact, he said, investors have withdrawn from nanotechnology ventures because they were uneasy about an area with unanswered health and safety questions.

Rejeski said one of the first scientists to raise questions about nanotechnology environmental problems was Southern Methodist University biologist Eva Oberdorster, who discovered in 2004 that fullerenes — best known as the "buckyballs" that discoverers named after geodesic dome designer R. Buckminster Fuller — caused significant brain damage in largemouth bass when the fish were kept for two days in water spiked with extremely small amounts of the substance.

She noted that fullerenes were already being "produced by the ton" and warned that the fish experiment "may also predict potential effects in humans."

Shortly after Oberdorster's paper was published, England's Royal Academy urged the British government to move aggressively to control the use of nanotechnologies.

The Wilson Center, created by Congress and funded in part with government money, has become the country's most visible advocate of a more cautious approach to the new technologies. It maintains a database of products and manufacturing processes that involve nanotechnology, and once queried the makers of a "nanokayak" only to learn it was only a bit of creative brand-name selection.

Other organizations are also expressing growing concern.

The environmental group Friends of the Earth and the International Center for Technology Assessment, a nonprofit activist organization, filed a formal petition with the Food and Drug Administration five months ago calling on the agency to require manufacturers of sunscreens, cosmetics and other consumer products to disclose on labels the presence of any untested nanomaterial.

"FDA has been sleeping at the wheel, while hundreds of sunscreen and cosmetics products have been placed on store shelves without adequate regulations and safety testing," Friends of the Earth official Erich Pica said in a release.