A little more than a year ago, in the House Committee on Science and Technology hearing room on Capitol Hill, then committee chairman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) accused administration officials responsible for developing safety standards for the emerging field of nanotechnology of merely “sauntering” toward their goal.
Officials with the federal government's Nanotechnology Environmental and Health Implications (NEHI) Working Group listened glumly as Representative Bart Gordon (D-TN), who has since become the committee chairman, went on to describe the nanotech safety report they had delivered to him just the night before as “a very juvenile piece of work.”
NEHI returned in August 2007 with a new research priorities report that administration officials are calling the “second step” on the road to developing a comprehensive program to understand the potential environmental, health, and safety (EHS) issues arising from engineered nanoscale materials. The new report condenses the 75 research proposals in last year's...
