Lawmakers fret over health, safety impacts of nanotechnology

Andrew Maynard, PEN’s chief science adviser, told the House Science Committee in April that the NNI should devote $50 million annually to “targeted research directly addressing clearly defined strategic [EHS] challenges.” Another $100 million should fund “exploratory research that is conducted within the scope of a strategic research program.” That “top-level, top-down” program would identify the information needed to regulate or oversee development and use of nanotechnologies, determine which agencies will lead in addressing specific research issues, and decide how the research will be funded (see Physics Today, Physics Today 0031-9228 60 11 2007 29  https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2812118 November 2007, page 29 ).

E. Floyd Kvamme, the venture capitalist who cochairs the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, called a mandated percentage set-aside approach “arbitrary,” “overly prescriptive,” and “problematic in both practice and principle.” It’s not feasible to designate research projects to be exclusively EHS in nature, he told Gordon’s committee. Moreover, the NNI functions as only a policy and planning coordinating mechanism, he said; funding levels are established by the individual agencies through the annual budget process. The fraction of NNI funding devoted to EHS topics is likely to continue climbing anyway, Kvamme added, as industry picks up more of the applications research and as government involvement moves increasingly to regulation.

But Maynard argued that EHS spending estimates provided by the NNI were inflated by the inclusion of marginally related research. The Government Accountability Office concurred, judging in a report released in April that $7 million of the $37.7 million reported by the NNI in FY 2006 was incorrectly labeled EHS. PEN found just $13 million of the NNI research that year had been “highly relevant” to EHS but conceded that an additional $16 million was “substantially relevant.” By comparison, European nations devoted $24 million in 2006 to research that is highly relevant, according to PEN.

P. Lee Ferguson, professor of chemistry at the University of South Carolina, told the Senate Commerce Committee hearing that at least 10% of NNI funding is needed for developing methods to detect and characterize nanomaterials in the environment, standardize testing methodologies to assess the toxicity and biological uptake of nanomaterials, and assess human and ecological exposures from releases of nanomaterials.

Nanoparticles are worrisome because their size allows easy passage into and out of individual cells. Many nanomaterials are designed to be highly reactive, but their potential interactions with biological material are mostly unknown. Normally inert gold, for example, becomes highly reactive at the nanoscale, noted Kristen Kulinowski, executive director at the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology at Rice University. CBEN is one of six NSF-funded academic centers focusing exclusively on nanotechnology EHS research issues. NSF provides the largest share of EHS funding; the administration has requested $30.6 million for FY 2009. The EPA is in store for a nearly 50% increase, to $14.3 million, while NIST, which received less than $1 million this year for EHS, is slated to receive $12.8 million.

Briefing congressional staffers in April, Kulinowski said Congress should reconsider whether decisions on regulatory actions and risk assessments should continue to be based solely on the chemical compositions of nanomaterials, without regard to their size or structure. Most nanomaterials are subject to the Toxic Substances Control Act, which lists 75 000 regulated chemical substances. Charles Auer, director of the EPA’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics, told the staffers that most of the 35 new nanomaterials submitted to the EPA through “premanufacture notices” since 2005 have not displayed properties or behaviors that differ from their non-nano forms. Ten US chemical and materials manufacturers to date have committed under a stewardship program to voluntarily submit information to the EPA on nanomaterials they develop.

Computational models that can predict how nanoparticles will interact with organisms top a list of EHS research needs unveiled on 1 May by the International Council on Nanotechnology, a stakeholder group housed at Rice. The NSF-funded ICON study estimated that those models will require 10 years or more of R&D.

PEN, ICON, and others have warned that EHS issues need to be resolved if nanotechnology is to thrive and avoid a repeat of the public backlash that accompanied commercial introduction of genetically modified foods during the 1990s. With new applications appearing at the rate of three to four per week, Rejeski cautioned, “If government and industry do not work to build public confidence in nanotechnology, consumers may reach for the ‘no-nano’ label in the future.”