An MEP attempts to inhale some carbon nanotubes

Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are an odd and under worked bunch. In order to fill their time they built a second parliament building in Brussels and spend every fourth week shuttling between Brussels and Strasbourg while submitting expense claims.

The Devil makes work for idle hands, and according to Chemistry World the latest scheme from Brussels is to require labelling of any electronic device containing nanomaterials (all of them!). Oh, and while they are at it, how about banning nanosilver and multiwall nanotubes “in electrical and electronic products” for good measure?

It’s a bizarre and badly thought out proposal, and as Chemistry World points out

It remains unclear precisely what the MEPs deem to be nanomaterials. If they follow the definition used in the Novel Foods directive, then it would mean any material engineered or manufactured to be of the order of 100nm in at least one dimension. This, however, would lead to every electronic product requiring labelling…The sense behind banning long multiwalled carbon nanotubes is more apparent; for example, there is some evidence that they may behave like asbestos when inhaled. But even then, the nanotubes have to be free for inhalation, which would not be the case if they were bound up in an electrical product.

But who knows how MEPs think. Do they think that computers work as a result of large crystal bowls filled with carbon nanotubes being left in draughty places, or is inhaling finely ground iPhones through a rolled up €500 note all the rage in the toilets of the European Parliament?

It seems to be a clear case of make laws first, worry about the facts later.

The scientific basis seems to be “that test animals used for research in his institute on carbon nanotubes got pleural cancer, a disease many workers exposed to asbestos also caught.” The report doesn’t go into any more details, such as whether they were short or long nanotubes or what dose of nanotubes was administered to the animals so we are firmly in Daily Mail territory here.

No one is suggesting that nanomaterials should be squirted around willy-nilly, but putting out this sort of story seems designed to scare rather than inform. Some of the reports that claim to ‘prove’ the dangers of nanotubes have used such huge doses that the animals would have suffocated anyway, and I once met a US scientist who claimed to have data that nanotubes (once more of uncertain type) made rats live for up to 50% longer.

As with all toxicology we are gradually building up a body of knowledge which can be used to reduce risks, but as I often find myself explaining, nanotechnology is rather different to asbestos or even plastics.  It’s a set of technologies that was developed when we had both the tools to see what what we were producing, and a huge amount of data about the safety (or otherwise) of materials produced in the twentieth century.

Here’s the difference between nanotubes and asbestos. Pay attention now, it is important.

When the first nanotubes were examined under an electron microscope, researchers wondered if they could cause similar health problems to asbestos fibres. When asbestos was first being used we didn’t have electron microscopes and people thought that radiation and cigarettes were good for you. As a result asbestos was used everywhere, whereas carbon nanotubes are tightly monitored.

“Genetic engineering is a definable science: splicing genes into crops. With nanotechnology there are at least 1000 different applications, all unregulated with unknown risks.”

As the Canadian organic folks don’t seem to have got around to actually defining what nanotechnology is yet, one suspects that they are rather jumping the gun. It is rather confusing though as FoE, to their credit admit.

Homogenizing milk and grain milling create nanosized particles—milk molecules and wheat flour dust—but would not be considered products of nanotechnology….Nano Green Sciences, Inc. sells a nano-pesticide that they claim is “organic.” Other natural pesticides, such as pyrethrin and copper, could contain nanoparticles and nanosilver could be used to clean vegetables of bacteria.

I wouldn’t claim to be an expert on organic food regulation, but I was rather under the impression that ‘organic’ simply meant free from anything ‘artificial,’ as we discussed  when the UK Soil Association also banned all things nano. It would seem that the natural/man made division would catch all engineered nanomaterials anyway, so explicitly banning them is as much a waste of time as banning cloned sheep from being in organic pigeons or grasshoppers from dancing on the moon.

Abolish Science Now!

As an adjunct to my previous post, Science today reports on a new report from the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies (The Impact of Genetically Engineered Crops on Farm Sustainability in the United States) which seems to conclude that biotech crops are good for farmers and the environment, with the usual caveats and uncertainties of course.

So fourteen years after the press and environmental groups declared GMOs to be bad, we now find that they are, in general, quite good in both environmental and economic terms. It’s a reasonable time lag, and I think we’ll see something similar for nanotech, synthetic biology and most other emerging technologies. However the meme that GMO’s are bad is so well entrenched that it may take another ten years and a lot more science to reverse it.

And this gets to the nub of the issue between science and society. Any anti technology movement, from smashing up Spinning Jennies to ripping up GMO crops or disrupting nanotechnology meetings takes as long for scientific evidence to overcome as it does to win the peace in the Malay Peninsula or Iraq.

In the meantime, how many people have to die from preventable diseases such as vitamin deficiencies or malnutrition that science could have cured?

After ten years of nanotech scare stories I feel that we have a fairly balanced research agenda, with plenty of good science being backed up by excellent toxicology and risk management studies.

1. The entire strategy seems to have written by the kind of people who spend the first hour of a meeting explaining what to do in the event of an emergency, such as a leaky pen, and then don fluorescent jackets and hard hats to indemnify themselves the consequences of one of their number being hit by a meteorite. It’s all about public consultation, risk assessment and regulation, in fact anything that involves anything other than having meetings is excluded from the ‘strategy’.
2. The strategy seems to have been written by people too lazy to do any research. The evidence is damning as the report makes no reference to any of the previous UK nanotechnology strategy reports, and quotes entirely different numbers. Could it be that everyone on the comittee that produced this monstrosity was too dim to use Google, or simply too lazy?
3. The numbers just don’t add up. The report claims that “The global market in nano-enabled products is expected to grow from $2.3 billion in 2007 to $81 billion by 2015″ – a far cry from the also derided $2-3 trillion market numbers. I know that one of the organisations involved in this report spent a large amount of money for us to dig out the real numbers, and then apparently chucked it in a bin and grabbed the first thing they could find on the Internet instead. No wonder the UK has such a huge national debt!

I suspect the emphasis on talking rather than doing is because someone in BIS knows the true scale of the UK national debt and has realised that there won’t be any money available to implement anything anyway.  Let’s face it, in the six years since the RS report the entire UK nanotechnology strategy has involved the setting up of meetings, agencies, committees and public consultation so that we can worry about possible dangers and improve regulation. Meanwhile important areas, or indeed anything that works have been slashed, the UKs involvement in nanotechnology standards for example or the Nano & Me website.

Can we be absolutely clear? Spending six years calling for more discussion and setting up ever more steering groups to engage ever more stakeholders is not a strategy. Figuring out a way to move the excellent basic science in the UK into the economy would be, but this seem beyond the remit of this report.

Calling four government departments a bunch of dimwits probably won’t get us much work in the UK,  but the truth is that we don’t do any UK government consulting work. I was told by a senior civil servant at what was the Department for Trade and Industry back in 2002 that if they gave any work to Cientifica then the Institute of Nanotechnology would ‘go spare’ and as a result they were unable to work with or support either organisation. In the meantime we’ve developed strategies and dug out numbers for governments around the world, and despite being London based we have been roundly ignored by the UK Government who seem far more eager to promote anyone other than UK companies. Every UK nanotech report to date has excluded any data provided by UK companies. Even offers of free copies of our market research to government committees looking into various bits of nanotechnology provoke the same response as if we’d offered them a fresh dog turd wrapped in newspaper.

The real tragedy is that by publishing ridiculous documents like this it devalues the work of the entire science and business community. I know that there are some great people looking at nanotechnologies in BIS, in the TSB and of course Lord Drayson is no fool when it comes to science, but this seems to be a case where the whole is far, far less than the sum of its constituent parts.

On several occasions when I’ve been in a bar with eminent toxicologists they have admitted that there is absolutely no way that we could ever understand the toxicology of every kind of nanoparticle, and there is no point in trying. What you can do is draw broad conclusions, so that if we have a high aspect ratio structure such as a long carbon nanotube we know that it won’t be cleared by an alveolar macrophage etc, and then we usually get into a discussion about whether anyone is ever likely to inhale enough of the stuff to have a problem, given that we treat most nanomaterials with rather more caution than we did asbestos.

So for most toxicologists the choice is clear. Get paid to do some science or sit about for a bit?

When toxicologists ask for a global well funded long term study to allow the modelling of the interaction of various categories of nanomaterials with the environment, the funding agencies can only manage rustle up a few hundred thousand euros for a two or three year project. That gets you nowhere in understanding a new and rapidly emerging class of materials, so we just end up paying great scientists to sit on their backsides and browse the web for a few years.

Nanotechnology - According to the Soil Association

The UK’s well known and respected science magazine The Daily Mail has an article by Peter Melchet, Policy Director of the Soil Association who seems to need his head examined for equating nanotechnology with “Turkey Twizzlers,” but I suppose you have to do these things if you write for the tabloids.

It’s the usual Daily Mail journalism, take a few bits of fact and then extrapolate them into a nightmarish vision of scientists turning cats inside out for fun and then relaxing by forcing toxic substances down babies throats for profit.

Now I know the Soil Association is committed to organic farming, and that’s fine, but prancing around attempting to ban things that no one is planning to use seems a bit silly to me. If people want to eat food that is brewed in vats using biotech that’s fine, even organic beer and wine is brewed in vats and the waste products are then turned into a quintessentially British food, Marmite!

A "nightmare food" - brewed in vats

Here are a few of the choice bits of (dis)information from the article for you to enjoy:

Of the £5.5billion invested in nanotechnology globally each year, much goes into the development of cosmetics and health products.

Five years ago, when top scientists advised in the strongest possible terms to avoid the use of nanoparticles, the Government acknowledged the risk but took no action.

Nanotech food was part of a nightmarish vision for the future of global farming and food. Some thought that GM and nanotechnology were the keys to overcoming the multiple problems of falling yields from artificial fertiliser and pesticide-laden crops, continuing hunger and starvation, obesity and an increasing scarcity of the raw materials, such as oil, on which nonorganic food depends.

Food would be brewed in vast vats using GM ingredients, with added nanotech nutrients and vitamins. Scientists believed that the world could continue dramatic increases in dairy and meat consumption, even if the milk and steaks of the future actually came from laboratories, not cows.

The cosmetic regulation states that all ingredients present in the product in the form of nanomaterials should be clearly indicated in the list of ingredients, by inserting the word ‘nano’ in brackets after the ingredient listing. The ruling defines nanomaterial as ‘an insoluble or biopersistant and intentionally manufactured material with one or more external dimensions, or an internal structure, on the scale from 1 to 100 nm’.

As always, the devil is in the details and the detail in question is the definition. While one of the advantages of nanotechnology is that it allows you to control very tightly the size range of the particles that you are creating, top down technologies such as milling and grinding tend to produce particles with a wide range of different sizes, and while the mean size may be above 100nm, that does not mean that there will not be any sub 100 nm particles present. I suppose the definition of ‘intentionally manufactured’ is also open to question.

I have seen a number of ads recently for ‘chemical free’ cosmetics – which once again depends on whether you class tea tree oil and water as chemicals or not, and nanoparticle free cosmetics are a similar oxymoron. Depending on the production method used, the mean particle size could have to be as large as gravel in order to be even 99% nanoparticle free.

Germany has adopted the EU proposals with the caveat that

the general mention on labels of nano-scale materials in cosmetic products using the term “nano” might be misunderstood by consumers as a warning.’

While labelling may assuage some of the regulatory concerns, will the average consumer would be any more concerned with labelling the nanoparticle containing ingredients than they are with currently permissible constituents. Grabbing a bottle at random from my wife’s dresser I find a long list of ingredients such as Methyl Glucech-20, PEG-12 Dimethicone, and Polyquaternium-4, and I can’t really see that putting Hydroxyethyl cellulose dimethyl diallylammonium chloride copolymer (nano), or (C₈H₁₆N)_x^.xCl^.(C₂H₆O₂)_x (nano) would make much difference compared with the power of the cosmetic company’s marketing machine.

And that’s before I get into another debate with a polymer chemist about whether or not polymers are nanotech!

The article in question concerned antimicrobials, and nanosilver in particular, and I have to admit that I’m more likely to be encouraging my kids to eat earthworms than to spraying them with antibacterial agents. As the old adage goes, you have to eat a peck of dirt before you die, and with good reason.

But we also have to ask, yet again: why have we become so frightened of ‘germs’ that we feel the need to go to ever more extreme measures to vanquish them? Are there really people out there so terrified of their washing machine becoming a festering mass of life threatening germs that they feel the need to invest in a nanosilver coated machine? And if there are, wouldn’t an investment in cognitive behavioral therapy be money better spent?

Well said, but then the article is spoiled at the last by the usual mindless invocation of the precautionary principle – which for some reason applies to nanotechnology but doesn’t apply to more obviously foolhardy and downright suicidal activities such as cycling to work in Spitalfields.

Unlikely bedfellows they they may be, there seems to be a connection in some minds, and it keeps cropping up.  Apparently, this is part of a full-page ad in the Singapore Straits Times of Thursday, Oct 15, 2009.

UPDATE from our correspondent in Singapore….

Hi Tim,

I’m in Singapore for a few days and there’s a full page ad in the Straits Times just like you said.

It says they use a Nano Serum with ” nanosized particles 2000 times smaller than the skin pores around the breasts. When coupled with the unique gentle massage of our therapists, these particles penetrate deeply…. to achieve enhancement, firming and contouring.”

So there’s a dream job for you!

Michael Todd has some more thoughts on this, with the usual headline that the results are ‘surprising’ – I’m not sure that they are.

The researchers also found that “a large minority of those surveyed (44%) is unsure” – which once again correlates with my London based experience which suggests that around 50% of people who work in electrical superstores or man call centres don;t have a clue what they are talking about, but manage to form an opinion nonetheless (the exception to this rule seems to be builders and plumbers merchants who not only know exactly what they are talking about but show Herculean patience when dealing with lesser mortals.)

In a nutshell then, people don’t mind nanotechnology, or any other technology too much if they perceive that it will have a positive impact on their daily lives, and will put up with a modicum of risk in order to enjoy the benefits. A bit like a chicken crossing the road then.

There is frenzy in Kampala, especially among the middle class, of a new type of small glass, with near magical powers, claimed to enhance body mood and replenish water and other beverages with lost essential minerals. The glass is believed to have been developed at high altitude.

It costs between Shs500,000- 1,000,000. The glass, whose brand name is withheld, claims to make sick people get nutrients from its use. One pours water and drinks. It is also claimed that carrying it in one’s pocket makes them healthier.

It is one of the numerous products imported into the country based on a new era of advanced research based on nanotechnology, a science that manipulates matter at the scale of atoms and molecules.

The claims are total rubbish of course, and people have been complaining that it doesn’t work, but in much of the developing world there are no real enforceable standards on anything, from baby milk to drugs, or at least nothing that slipping a wad of notes to the right person won’t get around. I’ve seen similar materials, often claiming to be glass or ceramic based which can help with everything from better sleep to sexual stamina.

A major worry is, of course, that any fake or dangerous products making claims to contain nanotechnology tend to pollute genuine products, as we saw a few years ago with Magic Nano, which caused some respiratory problems but didn’t actually contain any ‘nanotech’. Despite that, it was cited as an example of the dangers of nanotech as recently as this month. Unfortunately, fake nanoproducts have the same potential to trigger knee jerk responses as genuine ones.

While we develop all kinds of detailed regulations and testing procedures for nanomaterials, it’s worth considering what the rest of the world has to put up with!

The European Commission then further muddies the waters by claiming that despite there being a threshold of the production or export of 1 tonne of material before companies have to apply with the REACH legislation, this  ”will not necessarily allow companies to avoid providing safety data on nanomaterials under Reach or related legislation.”

It’s a bit of a mess then, as no one knows how to classify nanotubes, no one knows what the relevant regulations are, and many materials may not end up being registered until 2018.

With all the worries about the safety of nanomaterials it is worth remembering that ‘traditional’ chemicals can also be dangerous.

A fire near Leominster in the UK is causing concern over the isocyanate stored there. Isocyante was of course the chemical which killed 8-10,000 people in the Bhopal chemical plant explosion in 1984.

While there have been concerns over the use of nanomaterials, by the time they reach the consumer their bioavailablity should be close to zero – even if by some feat I managed to swallow my nanotube containing badminton racket, the chances of any nanotubes being liberated inside me are exceedingly small.

Of far more concern is what happens when there is a problem at some intermediate stage. Like most nanomaterials, isocyanate isn’t something that most people would come into contact with – it’s an intermediate stage in the production of other materials – unless there is a fire, explosion or other unintentional release.

While a lot of the discussion of safety of nanomaterials have focussed on consumers, perhaps as a result of employing the same tactics as with GMOs, the  potential for human exposure is far greater from a disaster at a manufacturing or storage facility.