How Long Does It Take For Science To Reverse A PR Setback?

On April 23, 2010, in Health & Safety, Nanotech, Social and Ethical, Sustainability, by Tim
Abolish Biotech

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?

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The Eyjafjallajokull Nanoparticle Plume

On April 20, 2010, in Nanotech, by Tim

Eyjafjallajokull Ash Particle Size Distribution

An interesting piece of work from Þröstur Þorsteinsson at the Nordic Volcanological centre looks at the particle size distribution from the Eyjafjallajokull eruption.

Thorvaldur Thordarson quoted in The Economist explains

Ash particles are normally in the 50-100 micron (0.05 to 0.1 millimetre) range. But at a site 50km east of the eruption, 24% of the ash falling to the ground was in the form of particles 10 microns or less in size. Studies of ash captured from the air show that for every one of the largest particles (about 300 microns) there are a million or more in the 2 micron range. So though the total volume of the eruption, put at about 0.14 cubic kilometres, is low, the amount of ash capable of travelling long distances is high.

While the measuring instruments only seem to go down to 2 microns or so, given the distribution profile it is a fair bet that Eyjafjallajokull is producing large amounts of nanoparticles. It would be good to see some more distribution data, perhaps using this type of instrument?

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UK Nanotechnology Strategy Written By Dullards Or Dimwits?

On March 23, 2010, in Economy 2.0, Health & Safety, Nanotech, Ridiculous, by Tim

Since the UK’s new nanotechnology strategy was launched I have been either having a crash course in regenerative medicine or getting over a cold. In the meantime, my colleagues Andrew Maynard and Dexter Johnson have both taken a long hard look at the ‘strategy’ and found it wanting. No, I’m being kind, the general consensus is that it is total rubbish that makes the UK an international laughing stock. Why?

  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.

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Geoengineering – Engineering an All Purpose Political Smokescreen?

On March 8, 2010, in Nanotech, Sustainability, geoengineering, by Tim

There’s nothing like the mention of Geoengineering to get environmental groups even madder than putting a wasps nest down their trousers and beating them with a cricket bat, and for good reason. The idea that we could do something about climate change that didn’t involve re-engineering the political system would mean that we don’t have to live in caves, grow beards and ride bicycles. More annoyingly, some kind of techno fix would deprive some groups of a platform for the various other anti capitalist/globalisation/consumer agendas that have somehow got mixed up with sustainability.

Our old friends the ETC group, who spent the last ten years objecting to nanotechnology on rather questionable grounds, have reactivated their global network to write an open letter to “the upcoming privately organized meeting on geoengineering in Asilomar, California” which aims to look at a voluntary code “for the least harmful and lowest risk conduct of research and testing of proposed climate intervention and geoengineering technologies.”

What really gives the game away is their objection, or rather their outrage on behalf of a number of Philippines farmers groups, to the “almost exclusively white male scientists from industrialized countries” who will be at the conference.

Come on guys, why don’t you just come out and say that you are outraged by the lack of ethnic diversity in science, peeved about people making money out of it and hopping mad about not being seen as being important enough to be invited? What’s geoengineering, synthetic biology, nanotechnology or biotech got to do with it? Apparently absolutely nothing.

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The Enforced Idleness of Nanoparticle Toxicologists

On March 5, 2010, in Health & Safety, Nanotech, by Tim

My esteemed (and allegedly cute) colleague Dexter Johnson comments on a number of recent nanoparticle toxicity projects and wonders what is the point of them. I’ve often asked the same question (and been asked to leave the room as a result), but there does seem to be a weird academic bias towards reviews and public consultation and I think I know why.

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.

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Hydroxyethyl cellulose dimethyl diallylammonium chloride copolymer (nano) – Because I’m Worth It

On November 27, 2009, in Europe, Health & Safety, Nanotech, Products, by Tim

The European Union is to make the labelling of nanomaterials in cosmetics mandatory according to Chemistry World.

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!

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Why Printed Electronics Is More Than E-Books

On May 1, 2009, in Health & Safety, Nanotech, Products, by Tim

I mentioned recently our work at Envision on the need to be able to rapidly distinguish between various strains of pathogens and how nanotechnology plays a part, but printable electronics plays a greater role than simply producing the detectors.

The beauty of being able to print devices is that costs become almost insignificant, so the critical semiconductor industry metric of yield, i.e. how many of the devices coming off the line are actually working, becomes insignificant. A wafer of microprocessors containing 800 chips retailing for $50 each is worth $40,000, and given the volume of processor manufactured, the effect of a a 2.5% improvement in yield of $1000/wafer soon stacks up. In contrast, printable electronics can produce devices for fractions of a cent (although nothing as complex as a microprocessor) and if these are retailing for a dollar the greater than 90% gross margins means that its not worth tweaking the system to get an improvement of a few percent in yield.

Talking to semiconductor industry people about plastic electronics often reaches an impasse with repeated demands to know what the expected yield of the process would be, and industry players often just not understanding the concept of yield not being significant when it is a measure that can make or lose millions of dollars a day for silicon based semiconductors.

But when we are talking about detecting swine flu (or Influenza (A) H1N1 as it has been re branded) one of the key issues is getting enough tests into the hands of the people who need them, and quickly. Changing a semiconductor process is costly and time consuming, because of the need to maintain high yields, whereas with the printed electronics solution, or at least the one we have, the device remains exactly the same whatever you are trying to detect, and it is only the antigen that needs to be changed whether we are looking for flu strains, bacteria or anything else.

Apart from the cost, which is always high on the agenda in any business, it is the flexibility of the approach which fascinates me. Whichever influenza strain we are looking for, only a small change in the antigen used needs to be made to produce a new detector. In fact, with the technology in its current state, a number of different antigens can be placed on the same chip, allowing positive identification of any one of a number of strains. So creating a new test, or opening up a new market only requires a minor tweak, rather than re engineering an entire process and losing sleep over small changes in yield.

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Nanotechnology and Sustainability Podcast

On April 22, 2009, in Energy Efficiency, Events, Nanotech, Renewable Energy, Sustainability, by Tim

A number of people asked about the possibility of re-recording the podcast of the talk I gave at Green Futures at the weekend as the quality is a bit patchy. It’s something I have been meaning to do for some time, as I can talk several orders of magnitude faster than I can type. I should also point out that this was a talk given to an audience with no knowledge of (or prior interest in) nanotechnologies so the more sophisticated among you may already know most of this.

Here’s my first attempt, not word for word but using the same notes so it may be the same thing in a slightly different order, so now you can do something more useful while listening to my mellifluous tones with a bit of added hiss. If I do this again I promise to buy a proper microphone!

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Why Nanotechnology Is NOT The “New Asbestos”

On April 16, 2009, in Health & Safety, Nanotech, Products, Social and Ethical, by Tim

A recent poll by the UK charity the Mental Health Foundation found that 77% of people found the world more frightening than in 1999, and put some of the blame on the “worst-case-scenario language” sometimes used by politicians, pressure groups, businesses and public bodies.

It does seem to be true that to get any kind of (media) attention you have to conjure up an apocalyptic scenario in order to be heard. It permeates every area of life, at least in Britain, requiring the most implausible scenarios to be given equal attention to more mundane ones.

While setting up a recent retail venture I needed to rent a shop and get it spruced up. Normally one would think that getting a  few quotes from painters and decorators and choosing a  colour scheme would be enough to get things moving, but not any more. In a five page ‘pre-approval checklist” the landlord (a bank) requires a full and separate fire and health and safety assessments to be carried out before we can even start work.

This means paying a  few hundred pounds for a bloke with a  clipboard to come round to take a look, and then write an official report stating that in the event of a fire, shoppers should be evacuated through the front and back doors and should under no circumstances grab all the teaspoons and attempt to tunnel out via the basement.  The health and safety assessment will no doubt consider actions to be taken if a decorator falls off a ladder, mistakenly drinks a gallon of floor paint.

Hopefully the health and safety assessment of the health and safety assessor will have considered what course of action to take in the rather more likely event of getting a paint brush jammed up his backside by an angry builder.

Equally ludicrous is the fear that nanotechnology may be the next asbestos by a variety of lawyers and trade unionists in Australia who seem to have missed the debate we had on this four of five years ago. Public debate of nanotechnologies in Australia seems to involve a lot of shouting, swearing and storming out of meetings and we can now add attempting to terrify people with half truths to that mix.

Let’s be quite clear, carbon nanotubes are long thin filaments that have the potential to behave like asbestos in certain circumstances and depending on the length of the nanotube, but that is the only similarity, and a glance at a brief history of asbestos shows why, but here is a key difference.

When asbestos began to be widely used in the 1870′s there were no electron microscopes capable of understanding the structure of the material, it was simply some useful stuff. In the 1990′s when carbon nanotubes began to be analysed the appearance of long filaments led researchers to immediately question whether that material could behave likes asbestos and as a result huge amounts of money have been spent on environmental health and safety studies of nanomaterials ever since. Asbestos had been widely used for a hundred years before anyone thought about health and safety.

Even so, the risk posed by a material is related to its chances of a sufficient quantity of it being ingested, which is why asbestosis tended to affect people working with asbestos and producing air borne dust such as  miners, builders etc rather than people simply living in a building containing it.

But asbestos was widely used because it was cheap, whereas nanomaterials are phenomenally expensive. You would have to be crazy to build a roof with carbon nanotubes, it would be cheaper to use bricks made from compressed cocaine, and anyway it wouldn’t work. For most nanomaterials you have to mix them with something else, a polymer of a resin to form any kind of structure, otherwise all you have is a bag of dust, and once those materials are embedded in a composite it is highly unlikely that they will ever be inhaled.

This is a rather simplistic treatment of the whole nano safety issue, and for more in depth information SafeNano is a good place to start. I’d suggest all the lawyers sniffing fat fees from future class action suits and dreaming of running ads like the one below pop along to SafeNano too. I usually pay my lawyers on the understanding that they know what they are taking about, or at least can get expert advice. I certainly wouldn’t use a law firm that puts out scare stories and half truths to try to win business, isn’t that illegal?

“If you or a loved one has suffered from exposure to nanoparticles or other nanomaterials, you may qualify for damages or remedies that may be awarded in a possible class action lawsuit. Please click the link below to submit your complaint and we will have a lawyer review your Nanotechnology complaint.”

So when we look at any emerging technology, the 21st century situation is very different from that of the 1930′s. the last fifty years have seen huge advances in all sciences, from physics to toxicology, and the use if computing means that there is no reason for any researcher to be ignorant of anyone else’s results. Many of the mistakes made with materials in the past were due to ignorance of the structure of the material and its interaction with the environment. Now we have a huge array of tools to probe the structure of matter, and a massive and accessible body of knowledge of past mistakes to draw on, whether the toxic effects caused by the chirality of drug molecules or the structure of materials asbestosis, all available with a few clicks of a mouse.

There is really no need for anyone to be ignorant any more, scientists or lawyers.

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