FDA Asked to Regulate Nanotechnology 248
WillAffleckUW writes "According to the Washington Post, a coalition of environmental and consumer groups has asked the FDA to look at regulating nanotechnology. They point out that there are more than 100 nanotechnology products and that nanoparticles can penetrate cells and tissues, migrate through the body and brain and cause biochemical damage."
How to kill nanotech in its infancy... (Score:5, Interesting)
In both cases, the industry in question is regulated not at the results level but at the process level. To change the way an airplane is manufactured, you have to get your manufacturing process recertified by the FAA. It's a great way to prevent technological progress. To put this into perspective, modern piston airplanes are still using mechanical fuel injection. We're talking technology that was first put into use in the 1950s.
As a result, it takes the financial commitment of basically building an entirely new company in order to manufacture composite airplanes (as opposed to using aluminum sheetmetal and rivets). Manufacturers aren't allowed to truly compete with each other by continuously improving their products in meaningful ways because the cost of improving the product is too high. Everything has to be recertified when a real improvement is made.
And the same is true for medical equipment, which is one of the big reasons your out of pocket expense for a simple MRI session is several thousand dollars.
So if we want to make sure that the U.S. is dead last in nanotech, the best way to do it is to regulate it the way we regulate medical equipment and aviation.
This is pure insanity (Score:2, Interesting)
By placing a label on these products, consumers will irrationally be prejudiced against them. You should not do that to such a broad and beneficial industry. Mostly, these consumer groups do not understand the basic science. They just have a general technophobia and want to project that onto everyone else's lives.
Like anything, there should be health tests, but they should be data backed (as these are not). We can't assume that all these products are guilty until proven innocent.
Re:How to kill nanotech in its infancy... (Score:3, Interesting)
Automobile manufacturers don't have to get their manufacturing methods certified by the NHTSA. The NHTSA doesn't care how you manufacture something. It only cares about the end results: does the resulting product pass a battery of safety tests. If it passes, all is good.
The end result is that auto manufacturers can continuously improve their product, as long as they continue to meet the result-oriented safety requirements of the NHTSA.
That's the right way to regulate an industry: test for results, not processes.
Needless to say, the FAA and the FDA don't do that, and you can see the difference in the costs and the quality.
Ingredients in question aren't even all "nanotech" (Score:3, Interesting)
The excerpt alludes to a painfully obvious fact that the article authors are trying to gloss over: The ingredients being complained about have been in use far longer than the concept of nanotechnology has even existed.
They are using "nanotech" as a fud smokescreen to get stricter controls over a whole bunch of ingredients. Like zinc oxide (the sunscreen ingredient refered to in the quote). The definition of nanoingredients presented in the article is deceptively vague:
That includes basically every molecule in existence other than very large things like soot, DNA strands, long nanotubes (ironically) etc.
A better definition for regulatory purposes should define "nanoparticles" (admittedly a terrible term, but we're stuck with it now) as being particles between two appropriate threshold sizes - a minimum and a maximum, and whose interactions are not completely determined by chemical properties. (i.e. there is some "engineered" attribute which is not obvious given the composition.)
Re:Oh Gawds... (Score:5, Interesting)
Quite frankly, given the irresponsible extreme anti-regulation attitudes expressed by many here, I think I am in favor of a specific regulatory agency, such as we have for nuclear power.
There are too many technologists (or people who think they are) that are all too willing to play fast and loose, without an understanding, let alone a regard, for the consequences of their actions. Too many companies that would put short term profit ahead of the general public's welfare.
Regulation of nanotechnology is a no-brainer.
Re:Oh Good - Just What a Fledgling Industry Needs. (Score:2, Interesting)
Sorry, but you hit a nerve. FDA is, as I mentioned in an above post, deliberately injected between the public and the industries it regulates. As with any government entity, its political biase is reflected by the current Administration. The Commissioner, after all, is appointed by the Pres and serves at his pleasure. And the Commissioner also runs the FDA in a pretty direct manner. He definately influences the way FDA does its job.
if you don't like it, vote for the other party next time.
Personally, I don't always like the things FDA does. I don't like the way they've sat on the morning after pill - and neither did the director of the Office of Women's Health at the FDA. She resigned - after a productive career in the government - specifically to fight that one issue!
Like I also said above - I've worked for FDA for almost thirty years, and find my fellow employees to be largely a dedicated hard working bunch. We work hard every day to ensure that your food, drugs, et. al., are safe, effective, and unadulterated. it isn't an easy job. Our budget, like the rest of the Feds, gets smaller every year, and the workload gets bigger. As our workforce gets older, its gonna get smaller, but the amount of work we do won't!
If you want that to change, lobby your congressman/woman, but if you succeed, expect your taxes to go up. Safety and effectiveness ain't cheap! You can also expect industry to continue to gripe about us - as they constantly do.
if you think we are industry flunkies - then why are FDA inspectors often required to be accompanied by US Marshalls when we seize products? We have been shot at, attacked and run out of establishments we have gone to to inspect. That doesn't sound like industry likes us much better, does it?
Like I said, we are deliberately placed between industry and the public - and its rarely possible to please both at once - and sometimes neither one!
Re:The risk is in numbers (Score:2, Interesting)
What I find amusing about sodium (or potassium) cyanide is that it is such a well known toxin (and so heavily used in industry, as you point out) that it's relative toxicity is often overstated. The LD50 of sodium cyanide for oral administration (in rats, anyway) is 6.4 mg/kg [ox.ac.uk]. In comparison, that of caffeine is just 30 times greater, at 192 mg/kg. [ox.ac.uk] If we take into account that a single molecule of caffeine weighs 4 times that of sodium cyanide, the molar toxicity of caffeine is only 7.5 times less than that of sodium cyanide. When we then compare that to a supertoxin like batrachotoxin [wikipedia.org] (from the skin of some tropical frog), with an LD50 of just 1 or 2 micrograms/kg (and a molecular weight 12 times that of cyanide), sodium cyanide looks downright tame. Then again, maybe the surprise in the above comparison is just how toxic caffeine is... or that oral doses in rats aren't always indicative of the potential of a toxin by other routes. Inhaled hydrogen cyanide is much more nasty and easily produced anywhere large amounts of sodium cyanide are stored...
article has giant error (Score:3, Interesting)
The legal filing was synchronized with the release of a report by the environmental group Friends of the Earth that highlighted the growing number of personal care products with nanoingredients, defined as smaller than 100-millionths of a millimeter.
From Steven Den Beste:
Lemme see: 1/100 million == 10^-8. A millimeter is 10^-3 meter. Multiply them together and you get 10^-11 meter. So they're talking about banning particles smaller than 10 picometers.
The smallest atom is helium, which is 280 picometers in diameter. The only things smaller are elemental particles such as protons, neutrons, and electrons. I guess we have to ban everything made out of them, right?
It would be interesting to know if this is the Wapo's mistake, or if Friends of the Earth really are that clueless. I wouldn't want to bet either way.
All via Instapundit.