Gwyneth K. Shaw Photo
Andrea Haase of Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment and Jed Constanza of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — As the one-two punch of devastating earthquake and horrifying tsunami unfolded across the world in Japan last week, setting off what has become the worst nuclear crisis in 25 years, researchers and policymakers from across the U.S. and the European Union gathered in the nation’s capital wrangled with a different kind of risk-assessment challenge.
The group was brought together by the National Nanotechnology Initiative for two days of brainstorming.
The subject of the Japan catastrophe never came up at the two days of meetings at George Washington University and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which wrapped up before the full magnitude of the disaster became apparent. Instead, those assembled discussed ultra-tiny nanomaterials and nanoparticles — and whether the rush to develop super-products from them may, without adequate oversight and planning, produce their own environmental or public-health disaster.
Everyone at the two-day conference agreed that it’s time to move forward on regulating, or even just offering basic guidance about, nanotechnology. But the freewheeling discussions inside the sessions showed just how challenging it will be for there to be any movement.
Nanotechnology leverages super-small particles (a nanometer is a billionth of a meter) to create products with amazing properties. These materials can make bike frames lighter and stronger and sunscreen more transparent on the skin, as well as new medical instruments and medicines that can save lives. There is broad agreement that nanomaterials hold great promise for a wide variety of applications.
But shrinking these substances can change their properties, and scientists are struggling mightily to figure out whether, how and why that shift can make them dangerous in the process.
For example, studies show that nano-sized titanium dioxide doesn’t seem to penetrate unbroken skin—suggesting that a topical sunscreen might be relatively harmless. But other research indicates that the particles can cause lung inflammation if they’re inhaled, as they might be in a spray version of the same sunblock.
The key question is how to understand what’s happening, explain it to the public, and regulate it. Multiply that times every nanoparticle, nanomaterial, structure or application, and the magnitude of the task comes into focus.
The challenge bears at least passing resemblance to the one facing Japan’s nuclear industry ahead of the recent disaster. Running down every single risk scenario, even the ones with almost no possibility of happening, means almost certain paralysis. But, as we’re seeing now, hoping for the best, instead of hedging against the worst case, can lead to catastrophe.
For a decade, though, hundreds of research projects and near-constant discussions have yielded little more than gut feelings and muddy policy.
Looking around a room full of scientists and policymakers at the conference, British toxicologist Richard Handy (at right in photo) made a simple point.
For years, he said, he’s been coming to meetings exactly like this one, stocked with smart people who know a lot about various elements of the burgeoning nanotechnology field. At each one, the conversations follow the same lines: the community needs to gather more data and answer more questions. Only then, the thinking goes, can they make decisions about standards for labeling products containing nanoparticles, for example, or setting limits on how much people, animals or the environment should be exposed to some substances.
Another puzzle involves deciding how much of any material should be used in testing, known as dose metrics. Expose a cell, animal or soil to too much of a substance, and the results might overstate the risk. Expose them to too little, and the result might be off in the other direction.
Too many of these meetings involve the same conversations, said Handy, a professor and director of the Ecotoxicology Research and Innovation Centre at the University of Plymouth.
“The thing I think we could start doing tomorrow morning is take all the recommendations from all these technical workshops … and turn them into action,” he said. “It’s about acting on the information.”
The burning question: Which information? And who decides? That was part of the task for the participants in the conference.
During a session about the need for research to support formal consumer-protection legislation, Hermann Stamm of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre outlined the urgency of getting out in front of the fast pace of the development of materials and products that use nanoparticles and nanomaterials. An accident involving a nano substance, Stamm said, would be a “showstopper” around the world. That’s why the task at hand is so important, he said.
“If we do not get that right, [innovation] simply will not happen,” Stamm said.
And yet, the conversations keep repeating, said Sally Tinkle, who’s deputy director of the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office of the National Science and Technology Council, an offshoot of the White House-based Office of Science and Technology Policy. As one of the key U.S. representatives at the conference, she helped organize the meeting — and is a primary driver for turning the words and ideas into concrete action both at home and in Europe.
“The issues are extremely complex and very challenging,” Tinkle said. “We have some of the same research priorities, but we’re not talking to each other enough.”
Tinkle said her main motivation is a very basic one: get something done.
“We all know the questions, we all know the issues, but we aren’t moving forward,” Tinkle said. “Can we hold hands and cross this street together?”
These days, that street looks more like a multi-lane highway packed with speeding trucks. At times, the meeting seemed more like a place to list the major questions than an effort to answer them. The queries were as basic as how to develop an international definition of “nanoparticle,” and as complicated as wondering whether it’s possible to set up a curated database with research showing no effect on different organisms, to complement the papers published in scientific journals, which almost always show some hazard.
There are key differences between the U.S. and Europe: For example, the E.U. is moving into labeling products that contain nanoparticles or materials, while here at home there are only suggestions of such an effort. Todd Kuiken, a science and policy analyst at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, highlighted some of the newest tallies done by Wilson’s Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, which keeps an inventory of nano-related products.
As of late last year, more than 1,300 consumer products containing some kind of nano element are on the market worldwide, Kuiken said. That’s a sharp increase from just over 200 when the project began five years ago. Health and fitness products, such as antibacterial clothing containing nanosilver, continue to dominate the market, he said, but there have been spikes in areas like food, which raises questions about how much consumers know about these tiny substances.
The U.S. government lacks ways to measure nanomaterials, ways to validate those measures, and standardized toxicology tests to help understand how these substances interact with people and the environment in both the short- and long-term, Kuiken said. While the National Nanotechnology Initiative has spent more than $14 billion over the past decade on research, only about $100 million of that money has gone to scrutinizing safety, he said.
“There’s a lack of answers to provide the public about what they’re being exposed to,” he said.
This is where the arguments begin, and they flared — albeit nicely — throughout the meeting. Some participants lobbied strongly for labeling and consumer protections, while other countered that adding labels without being able to offer more sophisticated analysis would be asking consumers to understand things that scientists currently can’t.
As with most conversations about nano, there were struggles over whether it’s possible to test groups of nano-based substances or particles for dangers, rather than subjecting everything to the same battery of tests.
The differences in behavior of even particles that seem similar might make grouping quite difficult, researcher Delina Lyon said.
“It’s like comparing oranges to tennis balls — they’re both the same shape, they’re both the same size, but one’s not going to bounce like the other,” she said.
Yet, even as the grappling continues, these same people are acutely aware that new risks are poised to emerge.
“Tomorrow’s technologies are on the horizon today,” said Bruce Stockmeier, the principal safety manager at Argonne National Laboratory’s Center for Nanoscale Materials. “Are we now preparing, today, so that we’re not confronted with the same mess we have with nanotechnology today?”
That’s part of Tinkle’s job. She and other U.S. officials met with some of their E.U. counterparts, government-to-government, right after the two-day conference. During the closing session, she pressed the assembled experts to volunteer for assignments — some small, some big — to keep the spirit of the meeting alive until the next in-person confab.
“I’ve threatened some people — if we’re still talking about dose metrics in two years, I’m going to lock you in a room and you’re not allowed to come out until you have an answer,” Tinkle (in photo) joked.
More seriously, she said afterwards, the teamwork that will lead to solutions has to come from the science community, with the government officials coming in later.
Hardy, who is now in charge of riding herd on some of his colleagues, said he’s cautiously optimistic that this meeting will turn into something more than just another collection of bullet points and questions.
“The next task is action,” he said. “To use these meetings to kind of get a spark of an idea.”