Nano Safety Worries Scientists More Than Public

Nanotech Coward writes "The unknown human health and environmental impacts of nanotechnology are a bigger worry for scientists than for the public, according to a new report in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. The new report was based on a national telephone survey of American households and a sampling of 363 leading U.S. nanotechnology scientists and engineers. It reveals that those with the most insight into a technology with enormous potential — and that is already emerging in hundreds of products — are unsure what health and environmental problems might be posed by the technology."

not surprising

[leomekenkamp]

Well informed scientist see more possible causes for harm than the non-informed general public. This hardly comes as a surprise to me.

Re:not surprising

[morgan_greywolf]

Well informed scientist see more possible causes for harm than the non-informed general public. This hardly comes as a surprise to me.

Not always. Many times it's the other way around. Take, for example, genetically modified food. Most scientists working in this area see no harmful effects from GM food, yet many in the general public think GM food is going to kill them, cause cancer, or other such nonsense. Or human cloning. Many people in the general public are absolutely terrified of human cloning, yet I'd bet most scientists see no problem with this from a biotech standpoint, except for a few ethical considerations.

It cuts both ways.

Duh.

[SatanicPuppy]

Scientists are more worried about a lot of things than the general public. This is not because scientists are worriers, but because the general public is hopelessly ignorant about a lot of things.

I see all this crap about how bad reporters are at science reporting...This is mainly from people who never have to watch their work be dumbed down over the course of days to the point where joe six pack can get some glimmer of meaning from it. Trying to convey anything scientific to the masses is extremely difficult.

The truth of it is, the public, by and large, just doesn't care. They don't want to know. They don't want to make the effort. And if you succeed in enlightening them as to the dangers, then it's all too likely they'll panic and refuse to use anything even close to it, as was the case with nuclear energy.

For the same reasons nano works so well for drugs

[stox]

Nano formulated drugs can get into places that were impossible before. For this same reason, other nano formulated materials may present a severe danger. For example, I wouldn't want particles from the paint on my house to end up crossing the blood brain barrier.

Re:not surprising

[jandrese]

I'm sure the public will be able to grossy overestimate the risk once a movie comes out where people die from breathing nanoparticles or something.

The craziest thing is that with the average Joe the most common concern I've heard about nanotech is fear of the "grey goo" scenario, which in my mind is probably the least likely way we're going to destroy all life as we know it. The practical considerations of that scenario are enormous and we'd be lucky to get within 5 orders of magnitude of having to even worry about it.

The bigger concern in my book is the stuff that acts like asbestos in your lungs and gives you cancer or just makes a mess of cell walls.

Re:Ok,

[kebes]

So they are all worried about grey goo? [wikipedia.org]

No, not at all. The "grey goo" scenario (where self-replicating nano-robots consume all available resources and turn all materials into a giant amorphous glob of nanomachines) is not taken seriously both because it is unlikely to be plausible (with respect to things like complexity of design and thermodynamics of matter conversion and pattern replication); and because our current research in nanotechnology is too primitive compared to the molecular nanotechnology [wikipedia.org] that would be required for that scenario to even be remotely possible.

No, the current concerns with nanotechnology are much more mundane: things like nanoparticles causing health concerns by passing into people's bodies and accumulating in organs. There is already some research suggesting that (some) nanoparticles can actually absorb into tissues or even pass through cell membranes. One of the reasons that nanoparticles might be great for biological applications is that they can be made to be at a size-scale that many biological processes ignore. The lack of an immune response is great in some ways, but it also means that the body may not be able to deal with possible negative side-effects.

Other possible health, safety, and environmental concerns are just variants of what we're already worried about: carcinogens, flammability, toxicity, accumulation in the environment, etc. Associated with all this is coming up with the right procedures for filtering out dangerous materials, disposing of them safely, and so on. All these conventional concerns must be reconsidered when dealing with nanomaterials, since their behavior is different and sometimes non-intuitive.

(Disclosure: I do research in "nanotechnology.")

Re:not surprising

[SatanicPuppy]

If people really cared that much about GM food, it'd have to be, you know, labeled. Thanks to the GM lobby, most people have already been eating GM foods for years. I have a problem with GM foods, but it's more about the problem with the modified plants cross-pollenating with unmodified plants, and corrupting unmodified seed lines, as well as the crappy business policies of companies like Monsanto.

I don't have any particular opinion about human cloning, except for the fact that I don't see any actual point in it. Animal cloning is done to strengthen the breed, technically, so either we're advocating some kind of eugenics, which is just inherently a bad idea, or we're catering to people's mistaken desire to have a genetic duplicate of a dead person, which is also a pretty bad idea.

Re:not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

In any case, as you said it's hardly surprising that the people most intimately familiar with the technology are best able to predict its problems/shortcomings.

Unfortunately, it takes multidisciplinary research. Nanotechnology research insiders are most interested in possible health problems, that is true, but neither they, nor specialists in fields that explore potential "victims" (e.g. biochemists) can't see a whole picture on their own, using only their own expertise.

Re:not surprising

[itsdapead]

Most scientists working in this area see no harmful effects from GM food, yet many in the general public think GM food is going to kill them, cause cancer, or other such nonsense.

Problem is, most members of the general public (at least here in the UK) remember the little debacle a few years back when

1. most scientists working in the area saw no danger in feeding animals on the bovine equivalent of Soylent Green
2. Whups, the cows are getting BSE, but most scientists saw no danger of it passing to humans
3. Ah, perhaps there was some danger of it passing to humans after all, but despite CJD having a long, indeterminate incubation period and there not being any test for it, most scientists see no danger of a mass epidemic of horrible lingering deaths (fingers crossed...)

Consequently, the general public can be forgiven for suspecting that "most scientists" get altogether too much funding from Big Agrobusiness to have an impartial view on the matter. This is rather unfair to "most scientists" and probably more due to politicians not understanding the difference between conclusive scientific proof and risk/benefit analysis (when the only benefit is to the coffers of Big Agrobusiness; the starving third world can't afford GM seed and the overfed first world has no particular need for more efficient agriculture).

Re:not surprising

[fmobus]

I'd risk there is some effect on the concentration of oxygen dissolved in the water after a microwave-heating/cooling cycle. It should also be compared with boiling water the normal way and them cooling it.

Re:not surprising

[SatanicPuppy]

Consider all the rational improvements that could be made through genetic improvements: we could increase tendencies to be smart, scientific, responsible, just, good-natured, conscientious, or whatever other characteristics are found to have genetic inputs.

And we could increase the tendencies to be dumb, obedient, hard working, and short-lived, thereby making us into the people that governments and corporations would dream us to be.

Do you really want to start going down that road? I don't like companies messing casually with plant genomes...Do you really want to jack some patented gene sequences into your kids? If they breed is it going to violate someone's copyright?

Re:not surprising

[Real1tyCzech]

Or rather, they see the full equation (Practicality vs. Manufactured Pseudo-Science), and unlike the general public aren't swayed by the fear-mongering, liberal-leaning media.

Nonsensical survey

[joeyblades]

This survey is bunk!

Nanotechnology is still in it's infancy. There are a lot of things we don't know. Ask an average scientist for an opinion about the possibility of unplanned consequences in a relatively immature area of science and he will answer "I don't know". Ask any non-scientist the same question and the average non-scientist will have some sort of opinion, usually based on "If I haven't heard anything bad, it must be OK".

This survey is comparing apples to oranges and trying to draw some inference from essentially a non-committal response from the scientific community.

"Scientists aren't saying there are problems," says the study's lead author Dietram Scheufele, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of life sciences communication and journalism. "They're saying, 'we don't know. The research hasn't been done.'"

Leave it to the uninformed media to read doom and gloom into something so mundane...