Physicist Andrew Maynard sat at the head table in a packed conference room at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, and unscrewed the lid from a jar of calcium powder containing nanoparticles. A puff of the powder rose into the air as he lifted the lid.
“Is it safe to breathe this in?” he asked the audience. He held up a jar of face cream containing carbon-60, or buckyballs. “You put this on your face. Is it safe, or not? I don’t know.”
Nobody else knows either, Maynard said, and that is the reason he is calling on the federal government to develop a research strategy to determine the health and safety risks of the emerging field of nanotechnology. In his new Wilson Center report, Nanotechnology: A Research Strategy for Addressing Risk, Maynard recommends that $100 million be spent over the next two years on...
