Wanted: Nano-Cops

Experts on the cutting edge of revolutionary new technology aren’t waiting for the government to watch over their booming new industry. They want to band together to start policing themselves.

At least some of them do.

They put out a call for nano-cops — people to get in front of the potential health and environmental dangers of nanotechnology, the development of medical„ environmental and consumer super-products from tiny particles with surprisingly powerful properties.

The call went out last week at a gathering in Denver, where some of the world’s leading nanotechnology and solar energy experts held a ​“Nano Renewable Energy Summit.”

“There are no good, well-controlled studies to prove the safety of our nanomaterials,” Jim Hussey, the CEO of a biomaterials company called NanoInk, said at the summit. ​“Frankly, we have none. We need to lead the world in environmental health and safety nanotech testing. We either get ahead of this or it will roll over us as an industry.”

Bipartisan Pressure

Support for nanotechnology is deeply political, and it doesn’t necessarily split along clear party lines. For instance, positive votes for basic science research are declining among Congressional Republicans, Hussey said.

“We’ve lost one of the major political parties,” he said during a fascinating talk at the summit. ​“If the Republicans win control over the House or Senate in November they will take down basic science research funding.”

Many Democrats have questions, too. In fact, U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D‑NJ) just proposed the Safe Chemicals Act of 2010, amendments to the venerable Toxic Substance Control Act of 1976 that have alarmed the nanotech industry because they would enforce a new round of expensive safety testing for chemicals.

But the nanotech industry has more immediate concerns, according to Hussey. In Denver, he pointed to disturbing medical studies, and called for the industry to immediately police itself on environmental health and safety issues.

The first order of business, he said, is a comprehensive self-funded program to characterize the health effects of nano materials.

“There are no good, well-controlled studies to prove the safety of our nanomaterials,” Hussey said. ​“Frankly, we have none. We need to lead the world in environmental health and safety nanotech testing. We either get ahead of this or it will roll over us as an industry.”

Nanomaterials, said Hussey, live for a long time in the body, though if they’re larger than 300 nanometers (a measure that is a billionth of a meter) they are captured and metabolized by the liver. Of most concern are the smaller 40- to 50-nanometer particles – at the cutting edge of today’s nanotech engineering – that can penetrate cell pores and invade the cell nucleus.

“The physical size of the particle has given it access to the cell in a way that was never there before,” Hussey said. ​“It opens a door that was closed.” A 2008 paper in Nature noted that the smaller nanotech particles demonstrated the greatest ability to ​“alter signaling processes essential for basic cell functions (including cell death).” If you’re very technical, you can learn from this recent paper how nanotech particles can affect cell migration.

“Some people in our industry say that nanoparticles have no biological effect, but there’s no question that they do,” Hussey said.

Is there a cancer risk? ​“There is no question that the invasion of cells by nanoparticles could be carcinogenic,” he declared. These are significant admissions from an industry that has been on the defensive.

In an interview, Hussey compared the current situation to a ringing fire alarm.

“We know the alarm has gone off, but we don’t know if it’s a fire in a wastebasket or one engulfing the whole house,” he said. ​“We don’t have the data, but we need it. Reporters are writing stories without there being much definitive information available. So that puts the burden on us to do those studies in a systematic way.”

Conference participants told me that Hussey’s presentation was in line with an earlier talk by Don Ewert, the environmental health and safety manager for OSD BioPharmaceuticals. Ewert also called for self-regulation, but the tone sounded very different to me.

Where Hussey called for urgent action, Ewert projected a series of articles on nanotech health issues (including a recent three-part series on AOL) and called them ​“baloney.”

Ewert’s argument was not that nanotech poses no health risk, but that ​“today we have forensics and toxicology we never had in the time of asbestos [a reference point for some nanotech critics].” He outlined detailed nanotech safety analysis that could result in a risk-factor scale for nanotech products from ​“risk free” to ​“do not produce.”

Ewert noted the need for safe handling protocols for hot-seat substances like carbon nanotubes. As a possible alarm bell for nano advocates, Bayer MaterialScience last November set a low occupational limit for exposure to nanotubes. ​“It’s a mistake to say that nanomaterials are ​‘safe,’ but it’s also a mistake to say they are ​‘dangerous,’” Ewert said. ​“Can we as an industry manage the risks? Absolutely.”

The industry clearly prefers in vitro lab tests over much more expensive in vivo testing using animals, but such reliable cell-based assays that correlate to animal studies are not currently available. According to Hussey, that testing has long been discussed, but Sen. Lautenberg’s bill gives the need to develop dependable protocols new urgency. Full-scale animal testing of just 2,000 substances a year (two percent of the 88,000 chemicals in EPA’s inventory) could cost $10 billion a year over many years, Hussey said, and would secondarily require the yearly sacrifice of 200,000 rodents and 20,000 monkeys or dogs.

The reaction in the animal rights community to such an escalation of testing is hard to imagine. But there are other considerations. ​“It would bankrupt the industry to do that kind of testing,” Hussey said.