Category: Social and economic aspects of nanotechnology

Public Engagement and Nanotechnology – the UK experience

What do the public think about nanotechnology? This is a question that has worried scientists and policy makers ever since the subject came to prominence. In the UK, as in other countries, we’ve seen a number of attempts to engage with the public around the subject. This article, written for an edited book about public engagement with science more generally in the UK, attempts to summarise the UK’s experience in this area.

From public understanding to public engagement

Nanotechnology emerged as a focus of public interest and concern in the UK in 2003, prompted, not least, by a high profile intervention on the subject from the Prince of Wales. This was an interesting time in the development of thinking about public engagement with science. A consensus about the underlying philosophy underlying the public understanding of science movement, dating back to the Bodmer report (PDF) in 1985, had begun to unravel. This was prompted, on the one hand, by sustained and influential critique of some of the assumptions underlying PUS from social scientists, particularly from the Lancaster school associated with Brian Wynne. On the other hand, the acrimony surrounding the public debates about agricultural biotechnology and the government’s handling of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy outbreak led many to diagnosis a crisis of trust between the public and the world of science and technology.

In response to these difficulties, a rather different view of the way scientists and the public should interact gained currency. According to the critique of Wynne and colleagues, the idea of “Public Understanding of Science” was founded on a “deficit model”, which assumed that the key problem in the relationship between the public and science was an ignorance on the part of the public both of the basic scientific facts and of the fundamental process of science, and if these deficits in knowledge were corrected the deficit in trust would disappear. To Wynne, this was both patronizing, in that it disregarded the many forms of expertise possessed by non-scientists, and highly misleading, in that it neglected the possibility that public concerns about new technologies might revolve around perceptions of the weaknesses of the human institutions that proposed to implement them, and not on technical matters at all.

The proposed remedy for the failings of the deficit model was to move away from an emphasis on promoting the public understanding of science to a more reflexive approach to engaging with the public, with an effort to achieve a real dialogue between the public and the scientific community. Coupled with this was a sense that the place to begin this dialogue was upstream in the innovation process, while there was still scope to steer its direction in ways which had broad public support. These ideas were succinctly summarised in a widely-read pamphlet from the think-tank Demos, “See-through science – why public engagement needs to move upstream ” .

Enter nanotechnology

In response to the growing media profile of nanotechnology, in 2003 the government commissioned the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering to carry out a wide-ranging study on nanotechnology and the health and safety, environmental, ethical and social issues that might stem from it. The working group included, in addition to distinguished scientists, a philosopher, a social scientist and a representative of an environmental NGO. The process of producing the report itself involved public engagement, with two in-depth workshops exploring the potential hopes and concerns that members of the public might have about nanotechnology.

The report – “Nanoscience and nanotechnologies: opportunities and uncertainties” – was published in 2004, and amongst its recommendations was a whole-hearted endorsement of the upstream public engagement approach: “a constructive and proactive debate about the future of nanotechnologies should be undertaken now – at a stage when it can inform key decisions about their development and before deeply entrenched or polarised positions appear.”

Following this recommendation, a number of public engagement activities around nanotechnology have taken place in the UK. Two notable examples were Nanojury UK, a citizens’ jury which took place in Halifax in the summer of 2005, and Nanodialogues, a more substantial project which linked four separate engagement exercises carried out in 2006 and 2007.

Nanojury UK was sponsored jointly by the Cambridge University Nanoscience Centre and Greenpeace UK, with the Guardian as a media partner, and Newcastle University’s Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences Research Centre running the sessions. It was carried out in Halifax over eight evening sessions, with six witnesses drawn from academic science, industry and campaigning groups, considering a wide variety of potential applications of nanotechnology. Nanodialogues took a more focused approach; each of its four exercises, which were described as “experiments”, considered a single aspect or application area of nanotechnology. These included a very concrete example of a proposed use for nanotechnology – a scheme to use nanoparticles to remediate polluted groundwater – and the application of nanoscience in the context of a large corporation.

The Nanotechnology Engagement Group provided a wider forum to consider the lessons to be learnt from these and other public engagement exercises both in the UK and abroad; this reported in the summer of 2007 (the report is available here). This revealed a rather consistent message from public engagement. Broadly speaking, there was considerable excitement from the public about possible beneficial outcomes from nanotechnology, particularly in potential applications such as renewable energy, and medical applications. The more general value of such technologies in promoting jobs and economic growth were also recognised.

There were concerns, too. The questions that have been raised about potential safety and toxicity issues associated with some nanoparticles caused disquiet, and there were more general anxieties (probably not wholly specific to nanotechnology) about who controls and regulates new technology.

Reviewing a number of public engagement activities related to nanotechnology also highlighted some practical and conceptual difficulties. There was sometimes a lack of clarity about the purpose and role of public engagement; this leaves space for the cynical view that such exercises are intended, not to have a real influence on genuinely open decisions, but simply to add a gloss of legitimacy to decisions that have already been made. Related to this is the fact that bodies that might benefit from public engagement may lack institutional capacity and structure to benefit from it.

There are some more practical problems associated with the very idea of moving engagement “upstream” – the further the science is away from potential applications, the more difficult it can be both to communicate what can be complex issues, whose impact and implications may be subject to considerable disagreement amongst experts.

Connecting public engagement to policy

The big question to be asked about any public engagement exercise is “what difference has it made” – has there been any impact on policy? For this to take place there needs to be careful choice of the subject for the public engagement, as well as commitment and capacity on behalf of the sponsoring body or agency to use the results in a constructive way. A recent example from the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council offers an illuminating case study. Here, a public dialogue on the potential applications of nanotechnology to medicine and healthcare was explicitly coupled to a decision about where to target a research funding initiative, providing valuable insights that had a significant impact on the decision.

The background to this is the development of a new approach to science funding at EPSRC. This is to fund “Grand Challenge” projects, which are large scale, goal-oriented interdisciplinary activities in areas of societal need. As part of the “Nanoscience – engineering through to application” cross council priority area, it was decided to launch a Grand Challenge in the area of applications of nanotechnology to healthcare and medicine. This is potentially very wide area, so it was felt necessary to narrow the scope of the programme somewhat. The definition of the scope was carried out with the advice of a “Strategic Advisory Team” – an advisory committee with about a dozen experts on nanotechnology, drawn from academia and industry, and including international representation. Inputs to the decision were sought through a wider consultation with academics and potential research “users”, defined here as clinicians and representatives of the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. This consultation included a “Town Meeting” open to the research and user communities.

This represents a fairly standard approach to soliciting expert opinion for a decision about science funding priorities. In the light of the experience of public engagement in the context of nanotechnology, it would be a natural question to ask whether one should seek public views as well. EPSRC’s Societal Issues Panel – a committee providing high-level advice on the societal and ethical context for the research EPSRC supports – enthusiastically endorsed the proposal that a public engagement exercise on nanotechnology for medicine and healthcare should be commissioned as an explicit part of the consultation leading up to the decision on the scope of the Grand Challenge in nanotechnology for medicine and healthcare.

A public dialogue on nanotechnology for healthcare was accordingly carried out during the Spring of 2008 by BMRB, led by Darren Bhattachary. This took the form of a pair of reconvened workshops in each of four locations – London, Sheffield, Glasgow and Swansea. Each workshop involved 22 lay participants, with care taken to ensure a demographic balance. The workshops were informed by written materials, approved by an expert Steering Committee; there was expert participation in each workshop from both scientists and social scientists. Personnel from the Research Council also attended; this was felt by many participants to be very valuable as a signal of the seriousness with which the organisation took the exercise.

The dialogues produced a number of rich insights that proved very useful in defining the scope of the final call (its report can be found here). In general, there was very strong support for medicine and healthcare as a priority area for the application of nanotechnology, and explicit rejection of an unduly precautionary approach. On the other hand, there were concerns about who benefits from the expenditure of public funds on science, and about issues of risk and the governance of technology. One overarching theme that emerged was a strong preference for new technologies that were felt to empower people to take control of their own health and lives.

One advantage of connecting a public dialogue with a concrete issue of funding priorities is that some very specific potential applications of nanotechnology could be discussed. As a result of the consultation with academics, clinicians and industry representatives, six topics had been identified for consideration. In each case, people at the workshops could identify both positive and negative aspects, but overall some clear preferences emerged. The use of nanotechnology to permit the early diagnosis of disease received strong support, as it was felt that this would provide information that would enable people to make changes to the way they live. The promise of nanotechnology to help treat serious diseases with fewer side effects by more effective targeting of drugs was also received with enthusiasm. On the other hand, the idea of devices that combine the ability to diagnose a condition with the means to treat it, via releasing therapeutic agents, caused some disquiet as being potentially disempowering. Other potential applications of nanotechnology which was less highly prioritised were its use to control pathogens, for example through nanostructured surfaces with intrinsic anti-microbial or anti-viral properties, nanostructured materials to help facilitate regenerative medicine, and the use of nanotechnology to help develop new drugs.

It was always anticipated that the results of this public dialogue would be used in two ways. Their most obvious role was as an input to the final decision on the scope of the Grand Challenge call, together with the outcomes of the consultations with the expert communities. It was the nanotechnology Strategic Advisory Team that made the final recommendation about the call’s scope, and in the event their recommendation was that the call should be in the two areas most favoured in the public dialogue – nanotechnology for early diagnosis and nanotechnology for drug delivery. In addition to this immediate impact, there is an expectation that the projects that are funded through the Grand Challenge should be carried out in a way that reflects these findings.

Public engagement in an evolving science policy landscape

The current interest in public engagement takes place at a time when the science policy landscape is undergoing larger changes, both in the UK and elsewhere in the world. We are seeing considerable pressure from governments for publicly funded science to deliver clearer economic and societal benefits. There is a growing emphasis on goal-oriented, intrinsically interdisciplinary science, with an agenda set by a societal and economic context rather than by an academic discipline – “mode II knowledge production” – in the phrase of Gibbons and his co-workers in their book The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. The “linear model” of innovation – in which pure, academic, science, unconstrained by any issues of societal or economic context, is held to lead inexorably through applied science and technological development to new products and services and thus increased prosperity, is widely recognised to be simplistic at best, neglecting the many feedbacks and hybridisations at every stage of this process.

These newer conceptions of “technoscience” or “mode II science” lead to problems of their own. If the agenda of science is to be set by the demands of societal needs, it is important to ask who defines those needs. While it is easy to identify the location of expertise for narrowly constrained areas of science defined by well-established disciplinary boundaries, it is much less easy to see who has the expertise to define the technically possible in strongly multidisciplinary projects. And as the societal and economic context of research becomes more important in making decisions about science priorities, one could ask who it is who will subject the social theories of scientists to critical scrutiny. These are all issues which public engagement could be valuable in resolving.

The enthusiasm for involving the public more closely in decisions about science policy may not be universally shared, however. In some parts of the academic community, it may be perceived as an assault on academic autonomy. Indeed, in the current climate, with demands for science to have greater and more immediate economic impact, an insistence on more public involvement might be taken as part of a two-pronged assault on pure science values. There are some who consider public engagement more generally as incompatible with the principles of representative democracy – in this view the Science Minister is responsible for the science budget and he answers to Parliament, not to a small group of people in a citizens’ jury. Representatives of the traditional media might not always be sympathetic, either, as they might perceive it as their role to be the gatekeepers between the experts and the public. It is also clear that public engagement, done properly, is expensive and time-consuming.

Many of the scientists who have been involved with public engagement, however, have reported that the experience is very positive. In addition to being reminded of the generally high standing of scientists and the scientific enterprise in our society, they are prompted to re-examine unspoken assumptions and clarify their aims and objectives. There are strong arguments that public deliberation and interaction can lead to more robust science policy, particularly in areas that are intrinsically interdisciplinary and explicitly coupled to meeting societal goals. What will be interesting to consider as more experience is gained is whether embedding public engagement more closely in the scientific process actually helps to produce better science.

Overcoming nanophobia-phobia

It’s all too easy to worry about what the public thinks of nanotechnology, while forgetting that the public isn’t at all homogenous, and that their attitude will depend on their existing values and preconceptions. Three papers in the current issue of Nature Nanotechnology explore this issue. Dan Kahan and coworkers test the idea that, if people learn more about nanotechnology, they will tend to become more positive about it. Not so, they say: while people who support free markets and respect the authority of hierarchies find more to like in nanotechnology the more they learn, people with more egalitarian and communitarian views find more to worry about. Nick Pidgeon and his coworkers look for national differences, conducting parallel public engagement exercises in the UK and the USA. They find a somewhat surprising uniformity in views across the Atlantic, with both sets of people optimistic about potential benefits, particularly in the energy area. There are some national differences, with a greater consciousness of the possibility of regulatory failure in the UK (connected to recent history of the GMO debate and the BSE crisis), and a more consumerist attitude to potential medical benefits in the USA. The biggest media interest (see, for example, this BBC piece) has been attracted by Dietram Scheufele’s team’s suggestion that a dismissal of nanotechnology as morally unacceptable is correlated with religiosity, and that as a consequence nanotechnology is more publicly acceptable in the relatively irreligious countries of Europe than in the USA (see also Scheufele’s own blog).

I’ve written at greater length about these findings in this opinion piece on the Nature News website. I think many scientists will agree with Tim Harper that it’s a category error to ask whether “nanotechnology” is morally acceptable or unacceptable. A related question that occurs to me is this: when we compare public responses in the USA and Europe, how much of the difference is due to the religiosity of the members of the public being asked, and how much is due to the way nanotechnology is popularly framed on either side of the Atlantic? It’s notable that Scheufele’s paper illustrates the potential conflict between religion and nanotechnology (and converging technologies more generally) with a couple of papers about human enhancement, and a commentary by a Lutheran on the full Drexlerian vision of nanotechnology, all of which come from the USA. My sense is that this explicit connection of nanotechnology to human enhancement and transhumanism is much less prominent in Europe than the USA. Maybe it’s not so much the religiosity of the public that’s important in determining people’s attitudes, but the fervour of the people who are promoting nanotechnology.

Deja vu all over again?

Today the UK’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution released a new report on the potential risks of new nanomaterials and the implications of this for regulation and the governance of innovation. The report – Novel Materials in the Environment: The case of nanotechnology is well-written and thoughtful, and will undoubtedly have considerable impact. Nonetheless, four years after the Royal Society report on nanotechnology, nearly two years after the Council of Science and Technology’s critical verdict on the government’s response to that report, some of the messages are depressingly familiar. There are real uncertainties about the potential impact of nanoparticles on human health and the environment; to reduce these uncertainties some targeted research is required; this research isn’t going to appear by itself and some co-ordinated programs are needed. So what’s new this time around?

Andrew Maynard picks out some key messages. The Commission is very insistent on the need to move beyond considering nanomaterials as a single class; attempts to regulate solely on the basis of size are misguided and instead one needs to ask what the materials do and how they behave. In terms of the regulatory framework, the Commission was surprisingly (to some observers, I suspect) sanguine about the suitability and adaptability of the EU’s regulatory framework for chemicals, REACH, which, it believes, can readily be modified to meet the special challenges of nanomaterials, as long as the research needed to fill the knowledge gaps gets done.

Where the report does depart from some previous reports is in a rather subtle and wide-ranging discussion of the conceptual basis of regulation for fast-moving new technologies. It identifies three contrasting positions, none of which it finds satisfactory. The “pro-innovation” position calls for regulators to step back and let the technology develop unhindered, pausing only when positive evidence of harm emerges. “Risk-based” approaches allow for controls to be imposed, but only when clear scientific grounds for concern can be stated, and with a balance between the cost of regulating and the probability and severity of the danger. The “precautionary” approach puts the burden of proof on the promoters of new technology to show that it is, beyond any reasonable doubt, safe, before it is permitted. The long history of unanticipated consequences of new technology warn us against the first stance, while the second position assumes that the state of knowledge is sufficient to do these risk/benefit analyses with confidence, which isn’t likely to be the case for most fast moving new technologies. But the precautionary approach falls down, too, if, as the Commission accepts, the new technologies have the potential to yield significant benefits that would be lost if they were to be rejected on the grounds of inevitably incomplete information. To resolve this dilemma, the Commission seeks an adaptive system of regulation that seeks, above all, to avoid technological inflexibility. The key, in their view, is to innovate in a way that doesn’t lead society down paths from which it is difficult to reverse, if new information should arise about unanticipated threats to health or the environment.

The report has generated a substantial degree of interest in the press, and, needless to say, the coverage doesn’t generally reflect these subtle discussions. At one end, the coverage is relatively sober, for example Action urged over nanomaterials, from the BBC, and Tight regulation urged on nanotechnology, from the Financial Times. In the Daily Mail, on the other hand, we have Tiny but toxic: Nanoparticles with asbestos-like properties found in everyday goods. Notwithstanding Tim Harper’s suggestion that some will welcome this sort of coverage if it injects some urgency into the government’s response, this is not a good place for nanotechnology to be finding itself.

Nanocosmetics in the news

Uncertainties surrounding the use of nanoparticles in cosmetics made the news in the UK yesterday; this followed a press release from the consumer group Which? – Beauty must face up to nano. This is related to a forthcoming report in their magazine, in which a variety of cosmetic companies were asked about their use of nanotechnologies (I was one of the experts consulted for commentary on the results of these inquiries).

The two issues that concern Which? are some continuing uncertainties about nanoparticle safety and the fact that it hasn’t generally been made clear to consumers that nanoparticles are being used. Their head of policy, Sue Davies, emphasizes that their position isn’t blanket opposition: “We’re not saying the use of nanotechnology in cosmetics is a bad thing, far from it. Many of its applications could lead to exciting and revolutionary developments in a wide range of products, but until all the necessary safety tests are carried out, the simple fact is we just don’t know enough.” Of 67 companies approached for information about their use of nanotechnologies, only 8 replied with useful information, prompting Sue to comment: “It was concerning that so few companies came forward to be involved in our report and we are grateful for those that were responsible enough to do so. The cosmetics industry needs to stop burying its head in the sand and come clean about how it is using nanotechnology.”

On the other hand, the companies that did supply information include many of the biggest names – L’Oreal, Unilever, Nivea, Avon, Boots, Body Shop, Korres and Green People – all of whom use nanoparticulate titanium dioxide (and, in some cases, nanoparticulate zinc oxide). This makes clear just how widespread the use of these materials is (and goes someway to explaining where the estimated 130 tonnes of nanoscale titanium dioxide being consumed annually in the UK is going).

The story is surprisingly widely covered by the media (considering that yesterday was not exactly a slow news day). Many focus on the angle of lack of consumer information, including the BBC, which reports that “consumers cannot tell which products use nanomaterials as many fail to mention it”, and the Guardian, which highlights the poor response rate. The story is also covered in the Daily Telegraph, while the Daily Mail, predictably, takes a less nuanced view. Under the headline The beauty creams with nanoparticles that could poison your body, the Mail explains that “the size of the particles may allow them to permeate protective barriers in the body, such as those surrounding the brain or a developing baby in the womb.”

What are the issues here? There is, if I can put it this way, a cosmetic problem, in that there are some products on the market making claims that seem at best unwise – I’m thinking here of the claimed use of fullerenes as antioxidants in face creams. It may well be that these ingredients are present in such small quantities that there is no possibility of danger, but given the uncertainties surrounding fullerene toxicology putting products like this on the market doesn’t seem very smart, and is likely to cause reputational damage to the whole industry. There is a lot more data about nanoscale titanium dioxide, and the evidence that these particular nanoparticles aren’t able to penetrate healthy skin looks reasonably convincing. They deliver an unquestionable consumer benefit, in terms of screening out harmful UV rays, and the alternatives – organic small molecule sunscreens – are far from being above suspicion. But, as pointed out by the EU’s Scientific Committee on Consumer Products, there does remain uncertainty about the effect of titanium dioxide nanoparticles on damaged and sun-burned skin. Another issue recently highlighted by Andrew Maynard is the issue of the degree to which the action of light on TiO2 nanoparticles causes reactive and potentially damaging free radicals to be generated. This photocatalytic activity can be suppressed by the choice of crystalline structure (the rutile form of titanium dioxide should be used, rather than anatase), the introduction of dopants, and coating the surface of the nanoparticles. The research cited by Maynard makes it clear that not all sunscreens use grades of titanium dioxide that do completely suppress photocatalytic activity.

This poses a problem. Consumers don’t at present have ready access to information as to whether nanoscale titanium dioxide is used at all, let alone whether the nanoparticles in question are in the rutile or anatase form. Here, surely, is a case where if the companies following best practise provided more information, they might avoid their reputation being damaged by less careful operators.

What’s meant by “food nanotechnology”?

A couple of weeks ago I took part in a dialogue meeting in Brussels organised by the CIAA, the Confederation of the Food and Drink Industries of the EU, about nanotechnology in food. The meeting involved representatives from big food companies, from the European Commission and agencies like the European Food Safety Association, together with consumer groups like BEUC, and the campaigning group Friends of the Earth Europe. The latter group recently released a report on food nanotechnology – Out of the laboratory and on to our plates: Nanotechnology in food and agriculture; according to the press release, this “reveals that despite concerns about the toxicity risks of nanomaterials, consumers are unknowingly ingesting them because regulators are struggling to keep pace with their rapidly expanding use.” The position of the CIAA is essentially that nanotechnology is an interesting technology currently in research rather than having yet made it into products. One can get a good idea of the research agenda of the European food industry from the European Technology Platform Food for Life. As the only academic present, I tried in my contribution to clarify a little the different things people mean by “food nanotechnology”. Here, more or less, is what I said.

What makes the subject of nanotechnology particularly confusing and contentious is the ambiguity of the definition of nanotechnology when applied to food systems. Most people’s definitions are something along the lines of “the purposeful creation of structures with length scales of 100 nm or less to achieve new effects by virtue of those length-scales”. But when one attempts to apply this definition in practise one runs into difficulties, particularly for food. It’s this ambiguity that lies behind the difference of opinion we’ve heard about already today about how widespread the use of nanotechnology in foods is already. On the one hand, Friends of the Earth says they know of 104 nanofood products on the market already (and some analysts suggest the number may be more than 600). On the other hand, the CIAA (the Confederation of Food and Drink Industries of the EU) maintains that, while active research in the area is going on, no actual nanofood products are yet on the market. In fact, both parties are, in their different ways, right; the problem is the ambiguity of definition.

The issue is that food is naturally nano-structured, so that too wide a definition ends up encompassing much of modern food science, and indeed, if you stretch it further, some aspects of traditional food processing. Consider the case of “nano-ice cream”: the FoE report states that “Nestlé and Unilever are reported to be developing a nano- emulsion based ice cream with a lower fat content that retains a fatty texture and flavour”. Without knowing the details of this research, what one can be sure of is that it will involve essentially conventional food processing technology in order to control fat globule structure and size on the nanoscale. If the processing technology is conventional (and the economics of the food industry dictates that it must be), what makes this nanotechnology, if anything does, is the fact that analytical tools are available to observe the nanoscale structural changes that lead to the desirable properties. What makes this nanotechnology, then, is simply knowledge. In the light of the new knowledge that new techniques give us, we could even argue that some traditional processes, which it now turns out involve manipulation of the structure on the nanoscale to achieve some desirable effects, would constitute nanotechnology if it was defined this widely. For example, traditional whey cheeses like ricotta are made by creating the conditions for the whey proteins to aggregate into protein nanoparticles. These subsequently aggregate to form the particulate gels that give the cheese its desirable texture.

It should be clear, then, that there isn’t a single thing one can call “nanotechnology” – there are many different technologies, producing many different kinds of nano-materials. These different types of nanomaterials have quite different risk profiles. Consider cadmium selenide quantum dots, titanium dioxide nanoparticles, sheets of exfoliated clay, fullerenes like C60, casein micelles, phospholipid nanosomes – the risks and uncertainties of each of these examples of nanomaterials are quite different and it’s likely to be very misleading to generalise from any one of these to a wider class of nanomaterials.

To begin to make sense of the different types of nanomaterial that might be present in food, there is one very useful distinction. This is between engineered nanoparticles and self-assembled nanostructures. Engineered nanoparticles are covalently bonded, and thus are persistent and generally rather robust, though they may have important surface properties such as catalysis, and they may be prone to aggregate. Examples of engineered nanoparticles include titanium dioxide nanoparticles and fullerenes.

In self-assembled nanostructures, though, molecules are held together by weak forces, such as hydrogen bonds and the hydrophobic interaction. The weakness of these forces renders them mutable and transient; examples include soap micelles, protein aggregates (for example the casein micelles formed in milk), liposomes and nanosomes and the microcapsules and nanocapsules made from biopolymers such as starch.

So what kind of food nanotechnology can we expect? Here are some potentially important areas:

• Food science at the nanoscale. This is about using a combination of fairly conventional food processing techniques supported by the use of nanoscale analytical techniques to achieve desirable properties. A major driver here will be the use of sophisticated food structuring to achieve palatable products with low fat contents.
• Encapsulating ingredients and additives. The encapsulation of flavours and aromas at the microscale to protect delicate molecules and enable their triggered or otherwise controlled release is already widespread, and it is possible that decreasing the lengthscale of these systems to the nanoscale might be advantageous in some cases. We are also likely to see a range of “nutriceutical” molecules come into more general use.
• Water dispersible preparations of fat-soluble ingredients. Many food ingredients are fat-soluble; as a way of incorporating these in food and drink without fat manufacturers have developed stable colloidal dispersions of these materials in water, with particle sizes in the range of hundreds of nanometers. For example, the substance lycopene, which is familiar as the molecule that makes tomatoes red and which is believed to offer substantial health benefits, is marketed in this form by the German company BASF.

What is important in this discussion is clarity – definitions are important. We’ve seen discrepancies between estimates of how widespread food nanotechnology is in the marketplace now, and these discrepancies lead to unnecessary misunderstanding and distrust. Clarity about what we are talking about, and a recognition of the diversity of technologies we are talking about, can help remove this misunderstanding and give us a sound basis for the sort of dialogue we’re participating in today.

Nanoparticles down the drain

With significant amounts of nanomaterials now entering markets, it’s clearly worth worrying about what’s going to happen these materials after disposal – is there any danger of them entering the environment and causing damage to ecosystems? These are the concerns of the discipline of nano-ecotoxicology; on the evidence of the conference I was at yesterday, on the Environmental effects of nanoparticles, at Birmingham, this is an expanding field.

From the range of talks and posters, there seems to be a heavy focus (at least in Europe) on those few nanomaterials which really are entering the marketplace in quantity – titanium dioxide, of sunscreen fame, and nano-silver, with some work on fullerenes. One talk, by Andrew Johnson, of the UK’s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology at Wallingford, showed nicely what the outline of a comprehensive analysis of the environmental fate of nanoparticles might look like. His estimate is that 130 tonnes of nano-titanium dioxide a year is used in sunscreens in the UK – where does this stuff ultimately go? Down the drain and into the sewers, of course, so it’s worth worrying what happens to it then.

At the sewage plant, solids are separated from the treated water, and the first thing to ask is where the titanium dioxide nanoparticles go. The evidence seems to be that a large majority end up in the sludge. Some 57% of this treated sludge is spread on farmland as fertilizer, while 21% is incinerated and 17% goes to landfill. There’s work to be done, then, in determining what happens to the nanoparticles – do they retain their nanoparticulate identity, or do they aggregate into larger clusters? One needs then to ask whether those that survive are likely to cause damage to soil microorganisms or earthworms. Johnson presented some reassuring evidence about earthworms, but there’s clearly more work to be done here.

Making a series of heroic assumptions, Johnson made some estimates of how many nanoparticles might end up in the river. Taking a worst case scenario, with a drought and heatwave in the southeast of England (they do happen, I’m old enough to remember) he came up with an estimate of 8 micrograms/litre in the Thames, which is still more than an order of magnitude less than that that has been shown to start to affect, for example, rainbow trout. This is reassuring, but, as one questioner pointed out, one still might worry about the nanoparticles accumulating in sediments to the detriment of filter feeders.

Responsible nanotechnology – from discourse to practice

Like many academics, I’ve come back from my summer holiday only to leave immediately for a flurry of conferences. This year has been particularly busy. Last week saw me give a talk at a conference on phase separation in Cambridge last week, this week I’ve been in and out of a conference at Sheffield on thin polymer films, and next week I’m giving talks successively at one conference honouring Dame Julia Higgins and another on the environmental effects of nanoparticles. Yesterday, though, I found myself not amongst scientists, but in the Manchester Business School for a conference on Nanotechnology, Society and Policy.

There were some interesting and provocative talks looking at the empirical evidence for the development, or otherwise, of regional clusters with particular strengths in nanotechnology; under discussion was the issue of whether new industries based on nanotechnologies would inevitably be attracted to existing technological clusters like Silicon Valley and the Boston area, or whether the diverse nature of the technologies grouped under this banner would diffuse this clustering effect.

In the governance section, the University of Twente’s Arie Rip, one of the doyens of European science studies, spoke on the title “Discourse and practice of responsible nanotechnology development”. I must admit that I’d had a preconception that this would be a talk critical of the way so many people had adopted the rhetoric of “responsible development” simply as a way of promoting the subject and deflecting criticism. However, Rip’s message was actually rather more optimistic than this. His view was that, however much such talk begins as rhetoric, it does translate into real practice, and the interactions we’re seeing between technology and society, in the form of public dialogue, discussions between companies and campaigning groups, and the development of codes of practice really are creating “soft structures” and “soft law” that are beginning to have a real, and beneficial, effect on the way these technologies are being introduced.

Can nanotechnology really be green?

This essay was first published in Nature Nanotechnology, February 2007, Volume 2 No 2 pp71-72 (doi:10.1038/nnano.2007.12), abstract here.

In discussions of the possibility of a public backlash against nanotechnology, the comparison that is always made is with the European reaction against agricultural bionanotechnology. “Will nanotechnology turn out to be the new GM?” is an omnipresent question; for nanotechnology proponents a nagging worry, and for opponents a source of hope. Yet, up to now, there’s one important difference – the major campaigning groups – most notably Greenpeace – have so far resisted taking an unequivocal stance against nanotechnology. The reason for this isn’t a sudden outbreak of harmony between environmental groups and the multinationals that are most likely to bring nanotechnology to market in a big way. Instead, it’s a measure of the force of the argument that nanotechnology may lead to new opportunities for sustainable development. Even the most vocal outright opponent of nanotechnology – the small Canada-based group ETC – has recently conceded that nanotechnology might have a role to play in the developing world. Is nanotechnology really going to be the first new technology that big business and the environmental movement can unite behind, or is this the most successful example yet of a greenwash from global techno-science?

The selling points of nanotechnology for the sustainability movement are easily stated. In the lead are the prospects of nano-enabled clean energy and clean water, with some vaguer and more general notions of nanotechnology facilitating cleaner and more sustainable modes of production sitting in the background. On the first issue, many people have argued – perhaps most persuasively the late Richard Smalley – that nanotechnology of a fairly incremental kind has the potential to make a disruptive change to our energy economy. For example, we’re currently seeing rapid growth in solar energy. But the contribution that conventional solar cells can make to our total energy economy is currently limited, not by the total energy supplied by the sun, but by our ability to scale up production of photovoltaics to the massive areas that would be needed to make a real impact. A number of new and promising nano-enabled photovoltaic technologies are positioning themselves to contribute, not by competing with existing solar cells on conversion efficiency, but by their potential for being cheap to produce in very large areas. Meanwhile, as the availability of clean, affordable water becomes more of a problem in many parts of the world, nanotechnology also holds promise. Better control of the nanoscale structure of separation membranes, and surface treatments to prevent fouling, all have the potential to increase the effectiveness and lower the price of water purification.

How can we distinguish between the promises that come so easily in grant applications and press releases, and the true potential that these technologies might have for sustainable development? We need to consider both technical possibilities and the socio-economic realities.

Academic scientists often underestimate the formidable technical obstacles standing in the way of the large scale scale-up of promising laboratory innovations. In the case of alternative, nano-enabled photovoltaics, difficulties with lifetime and stability are still problematic, while many processing issues remain to be ironed out before large scale production can take place. But one reason for optimism is simply the wide variety of possible approaches being tried. One has polymer-based photovoltaics, in which optimal control of self-assembled nanoscale structure could lead to efficient solar cells being printed in very large areas, photochemical cells using dye-sensitised nanoparticles (Grätzel cells) and other hybrid designs involving semi-conductor nanoparticles, or III-V semiconductor heterojunction cells in combination with large area solar concentrators. Surely, one might hope, at least one of these approaches might bear fruit.

The socio-economic realities may prove to be more intractable, at least in some cases. The think-tank Demos, together with the charity Practical Action, recently organised a public engagement event about the possible applications of nanotechnology to clean water in Zimbabwe, which emphasised how remote some of these discussions are from the real problems of poor communities. In the words of Demos’s Jack Stilgoe, “The gulf between Western technoscience and applications for poor communities is far wider than I’d imagined. Ask people what they want from new technologies and they talk about the rope and washer pump, which would stop things (like snakes) falling into their wells.” It’s clear that for nanotechnology to have a real impact in the developing world, a good understanding of local contexts will be vital.

Perhaps, in addition to these promises of direct solutions to sustainability problems, there are some deeper currents here. Given the emphasis that has been given by many writers to the importance of learning from nature in nanotechnology, it’s perhaps not surprising that we’re seeing this idea of nanotechnology as being derived from natural sources, and thus intrinsically benign, cropping up as an important framing device. Referring to the water-repellency of nanostructured surfaces as the “lotus leaf effect” is perhaps the most effective example, both lending itself to comforting imagery and connecting with the long-established symbolism of the lotus leaf as intrinsically, and naturally, spotless and stain-free.

Whatever these deeper cultural contexts, nanotechnology certainly finds itself in the frontline of another important shift, this time in science funding policies. In many countries, the UK included, we’re seeing a shift in emphasis in the aims of publicly funded science, away from narrowly discipline-based objectives, and towards goals defined through societal needs, and in particular towards mitigating global problems such as climate change. As an intrinsically multidisciplinary, and naturally goal-oriented, enterprise, nanotechnology fits very naturally into this new framework and applications of nanotechnology addressing sustainability issues will certainly see increasing emphasis.

Sceptics may see this as just another example of a misguided search for technical fixes for problems that are ultimately socio-political in origin. It may be true that in the past such an approach has simply led to further problems, but nonetheless I strongly believe that we currently have no choice but to continue to look to technological progress to help ameliorate our most pressing difficulties. The “deep green” school may argue that our problems would be cured by abandoning our technological civilisation and returning to simpler ways, but this view utterly fails to recognise the degree to which supporting the earth’s current and projected population levels depends on advanced technology and in particular on intensive energy use. We are existentially dependent on technology, but we know that the technology we have is not sustainable. Green nanotechnology, then, is not just a convenient slogan but an inescapable necessity

What the public think about nanomedicine

A major new initiative on the use of nanotechnology in medicine and healthcare has recently been launched by the UK government’s research councils; around £30 million (US$60 million) is expected to be available for large scale “Grand Challenge” style projects. The closing date for the first call has just gone by, so we will see in a few months how the research community has responded to this opportunity. What’s worth commenting on now, though, is the extent to which public engagement has been integrated into the process by which the call has been defined.

As the number of potential applications of nanotechnology to healthcare is very large, and the funds available relatively limited, there was a need to focus the call on just one or two areas; in the end the call is for applications of nanotechnology in healthcare diagnostics and the targeted delivery of therapeutic agents. As part of the program of consultations with researchers, clinicians and industry people that informed the decision to focus the call in this way, a formal public engagement exercise was commissioned to get an understanding of the hopes and fears the public have about the potential use of nanotechnology in medicine and healthcare. The full report on this public dialogue has just been published by EPSRC, and this is well worth reading.

I’ll be writing in more detail later both about the specific findings of the dialogue, and on the way the results of this public dialogue was incorporated in the decision-making process. Here, I’ll just draw out three points from the report:

  • As has been found by other public engagement exercises, there is a great deal of public enthusiasm for the potential uses of nanotechnology in healthcare, and a sense that this is an application that needs to be prioritised over some others.
  • People value potential technologies that empower them to have more control over their own health and their own lives, while potential technologies that reduce their sense of control are viewed with more caution.
  • People have concerns about who benefits from new technologies – while people generally see nothing intrinsically wrong with business driving nanotechnology, there’s a concern that public investment in science results in the appropriate public value.

    • “Plastics are precious – they’re buried sunshine”

    Disappearing dress at the London College of Fashion
    A disappearing dress from the Wonderland project. Photo by Alex McGuire at the London College of Fashion.

    I’m fascinated by the subtle science of polymers, and it’s a cause of regret to me that the most common manifestations of synthetic polymers are in the world of cheap, disposable plastics. The cheapness and ubiquity of plastics, and the problems caused when they’re carelessly thrown away, blind us to the utility and versatility of these marvellously mutable materials. But there’s something temporary about their cheapness; it’s a consequence of the fact that they’re made from oil, and as oil becomes scarcer and more expensive we’ll need to appreciate the intrinsic value of these materials much more.

    These thoughts are highlighted by a remarkable project put together by the artist and fashion designer Helen Storey and my Sheffield friend and colleague, chemist Tony Ryan. At the centre of the project is an exhibition of exquisitely beautiful dresses, designed by Helen and made from fabrics handmade by textile designer Trish Belford. The essence of fashion is transience, and these dresses literally don’t last long; the textiles they are made from are water soluble and are dissolved during the exhibition in tanks of water. The process of dissolution has a beauty of its own, captured in this film by Pinny Grylls.

    Another film, by the fashion photographer Nick Wright, reminds us of the basic principles underlying the thermodynamics of polymer dissolution. The exhibition will be moving to the Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast in October, and you will be able to read more about it in that month’s edition of Vogue.