A report issued earlier this week cites that the EU invests nearly twice as much on investigating the potential risks of nanotechnology than the U.S. does—-$24 million versus $13 million in 2006, the latest year for which data are available. “It appears that the U.S. is guilty of wishful thinking in its assessment of research that will lead to the development of safe nanotechnologies,” says Andrew Maynard, chief science advisor at the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN), the publisher of the recent analysis.
While nearly $38 million was budgeted by the U.S. on the environmental, health, and safety (EHS) risks of nanotechnology for FY2006, the PEN report only was able to identify 62 projects that were ‘highly relevant’ to understanding risk, with a budget of $13 million. The total federal investment on nanotechnology is about $1.3 billion.
The primary reason why there’s only minimal funding for nanotech risk assessment is that there have been no definitive cases to date of personal injury or harm that has been attributable to nanotechnology. Of course, that’s the whole purpose of risk assessment—to evaluate the risks of a technology before it becomes too prevalent or the dangers become apparent.
A minor issue is that the PEN analysis overlooks the fact that the EU research would obviously be available to U.S. researchers to build upon their own research. Another issue is that citizens have been exposed to various natural and man-made nanomaterials for a very long time, again with no known hazardous outcomes. And then there are the significant benefits that nanotech materials provide to a product’s performance, which becomes a significant hurdle for any risk assessment to ignore in the overall balance sheet.
Researchers have had from five to 10 years to evaluate the risks of nanotechnology with only minimal risks, if at all, attributable to the materials. Any risk that is likely to occur at this point in time will be the result of either long-term exposure to significant levels of nanomaterials or to the exposure of a new class of nanomaterials heretofore unknown.
My point is that nanotech risk assessments should definitely continue—the research provides valuable information on both the potential risk and also the reliability of these materials. But, all sources of research should be combined and evaluated. And naysayers with “the sky is falling” syndrome would be better off in providing real results to the scientific community rather than comparisons as to who spends more.
