Nanotechnology: Who Asked You?

April 2nd, 2008

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Posted by ChrisG at 1:18 pm

Returning to one of our recurrent themes here at SW, via a new Friends of the Earth report [PDF, 2.95MB]on the use of unregulated nanoscale particles in foods. Nanotechnology is built on the promise that compounds of less than around 300-1000nm (depending on who you talk to) in length often gain enhanced versions of the properties of their bulk counterparts, or even entirely new properties. However, this promise of novelty is also the source of a great deal of concern. For experience has shown that the ensemble of a particular compound’s properties is by no means predictable, and that the full range of properties (including ones which are vitally important for risk assessment, such as environmental and physiological persistence) are by no means easy to characterise using current modes of in vivo, in vitro and computer-modelled testing.

The thing about novelty, however, is that it is also a powerful economic asset. Having a novum on which to hang your product (anything from increased rates of drug uptake to molecular self-assembly) means that, should you be a company engaged in an appropriate form of research, you can gain a comparative advantage over your competitors via imaginative marketing and the simple expedient of marketising your magic pixie dust in as diverse an array of forms as possible.

This is even more the case when the regulatory environment in which your new products are deposited to sink or swim is one where the obstacles to ‘innovation’ are at a minimum. Such is the case with nanotech: despite the widespread recognition among scientists (exemplified by the Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineers’ 2004 report [PDF, 3.5MB]) that the potential of novel nano-properties mandates a precautionary approach and treating them as novel substances, rather than as ‘substantially equivalent’ modifications of familiar bulk products, there is still no specific regulation of nano-materials anywhere in the world, or at the international level. So, as long as you’re a company big enough to bear the risks of operating in a regulation-free environment (far from regulation stifling risk-taking here, a lack of regulation makes risk-taking a luxury only the big boys can indulge in), there’s a lot of money to be made. This is particular so in the US, where regulation of toxic substances is hampered by the assumption that an absence of evidence of harm is evidence of absence of harm.

Friends of the Earth should be praised for having produced an inventory of internationally-traded products (other existing inventories, such as that produced by the Woodrow Wilson Institute, largely restrict themselves to national territories) which claim to use nanoscale compounds of one sort or another – typically, variants of nano-titanium dioxide, silver, zinc and zinc oxide, and silicon dioxide, all of which have been associated, within the small but growing body of scientific literature on nanoparticle toxicity, with various pathological effects demonstrated in vitro and in vivo tests.

Governments and industry have colluded, once again, in producing an inequitable distribution of risks for which no consent has been sought (especially in the US, land of choice, where commercial confidentiality rules have been used to prevent consumers from being able to choose not to buy nano-products). But there is also the question of what wider social dynamics the current ways in which nanotechnology is being pursued will support and promote. The other merit of the FOE report is that it draws our attention to several of these – from the possibility that the use of nano-compound coatings in packaging to extend shelf life will result in more long-range shipping of foodstuffs, through the further loss of everyday expertise in dealing with food, to the devastation of small businesses and community farms. What nanotech offers us is another reason to demand more participation in decision making about how technology is developed and used, because without the possibility of exerting influence over the direction of the flood of commodities, the social (and extra-social) relationships that sustain us will be changed in irreversible ways to which we will not have consented.